


nowhere else tonight we should be

by bettercrazythanboring



Category: Morning Glories (Comics)
Genre: Chance Meetings, Conversations, F/M, Future Fic, Hijinks & Shenanigans, New York City, Romantic Comedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-05-01 19:30:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19184182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bettercrazythanboring/pseuds/bettercrazythanboring
Summary: You would think Jade Ellsworth has it all.She is attractive, headstrong — successful, even. A little unworldly, maybe — very single, definitely — but she wouldn’t be moving to NYC for an incredible job if she weren’t doingsomethingright. And for the most part, that’s all true. But she also wouldn’t be uprooting a perfectly good life if she weren’t in need of a new beginning. Wouldn’t be so blasé about it if she hadn’t had to do it once before.Truth is, she’d assumed that if she just somehow made it to her eighteenth birthday, then it would all be smooth sailing from there. But it’s been a decade now since she set fire to her prep school and all the nightmares inside it — and maybe it’s time to admit that being a veteran of Morning Glory Academy seems like a lifelong affliction. For better or worse, there’s no moving past the death, magic, and messy relationships of her youth — particularly not when the messiest of them all is about to crash back into her life without so much as a courtesy warning.Enter Ike: wearer of scarves, player of women, destroyer of dimensions. Not the love of her life, but certainly something far more complicated.(Or: a romcom. It’s a romcom.)





	nowhere else tonight we should be

**Author's Note:**

> Basically a tribute to Nora Roberts. That woman knows what's up.
> 
> [Title.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJCxH2Qr3k0)

Jade has never picked a fight she couldn't win.

She's not the shy, meek type — a little quiet, perhaps, but only when she has nothing to say. She's roughhoused with plenty of the neighborhood boys as a kid. She's shoved her fair share of catcallers as an adult. She's even scratched her way through a couple of catfights in her time — although, to be fair, those had mostly been over philosophical conundrums rather than… whatever catfights are usually about.

Not to say she's never lost a fight, of course; she's been ambushed more times than she can count, and she's been almost backstabbed — literally — quite a few more than that. Other people have tempers too, after all, and for a while there, she'd had an uncanny penchant for getting herself in the crosshairs of aggressive, muscly dudes who tended to preface trying to kill her with something trite and meaningless, like  _It's nothing personal_.

Still, it's always been a point of pride with her that whatever she consciously decides to start, she can actually back up with her tenacity or her cunning — or her fists, if need be. No point in complicating life for herself if she'll have nothing to show for it, right?

Right.

Her pride can go fuck itself today. It's already bleeding from a million stab wounds anyway; one more injury won't make any difference.

Worse still that it's not even a person she's fighting: it's her own hubris, for thinking that she could move into her new apartment in three days, completely on her own, without even a stepladder. Or a mop. Or any wifi to blast Spotify with.

Worst of all, she's just spent the last hour repotting a plant she'd gotten at Ikea on a whim, which is about the three-hundred-and-sixty-seventh item on the list of things that need doing around the house — right above polishing the silverware, but just barely missing vacuuming the balcony. Now she's got an empty pot she doesn't know what to do with, and a plant she has nowhere to put — and because she didn't think to clear any tables whose surfaces she could've used for this monumentally important project, the floor of her bedroom is currently sprinkled heavily with rich, mineral-infused soil.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen — her name is Jade Marie Ellsworth, she is twenty-eight years of age, and she is a goddamn idiot.

With a sigh, she gets up, shakes out all the tingles and knots, and wipes her muddy hands on the overalls she's already decided to throw out the moment the last nail hits the wall. It's gotten warmer out while she's been working, and now all her clothes are clinging to her skin a little too snugly for comfort. She looks around her room, looking for something, anything, that she could conceivably cross off her checklist to create some illusion of progress.

She can't unpack her clothes until she has a place to put them, but she can't start putting the shelf together because there is no space on the floor — but she can't put anything else away because the other dressers aren't here yet. She can't unroll the carpet because it needs to go under the bed, but the bedframe can't be put together without the nightstands that go along with it — but the nightstands are buried beneath five boxes of books, and those can't be unpacked until the room has been thoroughly vacuumed; but she can't do that while all that stuff is on the floor, but she can't put it away because—

God, she needs a break.

She treks across the living room to the kitchen through the barely visible path between stacks of boxes, feeling somewhat like a jungle explorer. There's not much hope in her heart as she opens the fridge, looking for anything that she might still have left after her first grocery trip. Right, see, she can't do anything with these eggs until she can use the stove, but she can't use the stove until it's cleaned of all the remodeling dust, but she can't clean that until she's gotten everything else off the counters, but she can't—

No, stop that.

It's a beautiful fucking August day and she's in New York City, of all places. Unpacking everything will take months regardless of how much she gets done today, but her new job will start in less than a week, and lord knows that's gonna be its own set of headaches. When is she gonna get time to herself again like this?

She stomps back to her room, barely resists the urge to kick the Ikea pot at the nearest wall while shimmying out of her dusty clothes, and puts on a pair of cutoffs. Then, because she has no idea where any of her tees or tanks are — potentially still en route to the city — she throws on a breezy white blouse and rolls the sleeves up to the shoulders. Feeling more like a person, she closes her eyes and breathes deeply to center herself.

There will always be another chore, another project — but the whole reason she'd decided to move in the first place was to get out of the routine and remind herself that life doesn't just consist of the next item on her to-do list. The rest of her things will be here tomorrow, and with them, some helping hands too. She'd wanted to be finished with her share by then, but if that's not gonna happen, then shuffling it one day won't change anything. After all, unpacking with friends is a fun adventure filled with collective mishaps and probably late-nineties pop music.

Doing it alone is just downright depressing.

She nods, trying to convince herself of the words — then heads out the door before she can change her mind, armed with nothing but two pockets and a sense of adventure.

* * *

 

The air smells different here.

It's not the plentiful food, not the busy people — it's not even the slabs of concrete, she thinks — but there's something unique there, something no other place has thrown at her quite so insistently.

She'd been to New York once as a child, in one of the last family outings they'd all had as an unbroken unit. She can remember asking her father about the unfamiliar odor on the very first day; he'd just grumbled something about pollution, never sticking his nose up from the paper. There had been so many other strange things on that trip that she'd easily forgotten about it, assuming that that was just how all cities smelled. But while City Smell™ had certainly taken some getting used to when she'd started college, this isn't that.

It's the scent of dreams, maybe.

Everywhere she looks, there are interesting people doing cool things. Here there's a stylized bit of chalk art on the pavement; here there's an impromptu market of young craftspeople sharing their innovations; here there's a person showcasing an obscurely stunning skill with nothing but a hat by their feet. Even the other pedestrians exude an unmistakable aura of ambition, creation, and just plain happening.

Hell, even the nature plays along with the hyperreal atmosphere. The trees pay the people no mind, too busy enjoying their last few weeks of summer attire in a rich, luscious green; the sky dons a completely unbroken blue, aside from the tic-tac-toe of airplane trails to the south. The sun's warmth touches her arms in a light caress, and the fresh breeze keeps it from being scorching.

A day this nice has no business gracing the corporate capital of the world — but of course when has that ever stopped anyone?

Jade weaves through the streets of Brooklyn as though they were a maze and she were searching for right way. North, west, forward, looping back around… Her path probably looks like the tangled earbuds she'd left at home sitting in some dusty purse or other, but that's part of the fun. She'd spent most of her youth waiting to get away from the rural life — but while she can easily see herself living in a city for decades to come, one of the few things she does miss is the opportunity for aimless strolling.

There had been this old forest right behind the house she'd grown up in that stretched out for miles in every direction and always looked cold and gloomy, no matter the season or weather. Countless mornings when she couldn't sleep, she'd pull on a thick sweater, grab her secondhand iPod, and walk right into the trees, heading wherever her nose pointed. Sure, she'd gotten lost more often than not — and she'd been late to school because of it enough times that some nights her brother had straight-up locked the door to her room — but she'd always known that as long as she picked a direction and stuck to it, she would eventually find her way out.

New York might have buildings instead of trees and people instead of critters, but the basic principle remains the same — good old-fashioned wanders solve everything. Already she's gotten about ten new ideas for what to do with her new room, and already her failures seem so much less monumental than they had back at the apartment. She needs to remember to remind herself of that when the endless parade of emails and errands starts up again. After these hectic last few months, it's high time she remember how to just be.

Without any particular sense of direction, she goes wherever her whimsy strikes — through parks, past statues, over a river — and maybe three hours later she finds the buildings getting taller, the people busier, the sunlight hotter. She's somehow found her way into Manhattan, and this place is a different beast entirely.

It feels fake, somehow, being here. She keeps expecting someone behind her to yell  _"Cut!"_ , for all the glass facades she itches to run her fingers across to fall away, revealing themselves to be nothing more than cleverly positioned cardboard. It doesn't seem possible that so much of human history could've happened in a space so small in so short a time. Decisions made, futures chosen, dreams fulfilled and shattered — and all of this rippling out to the rest of the world. The weight of so many choices — past, present, future — makes the air dense around her, holding her in what could just as easily be described as an embrace as a chokehold.

Or the humidity. It could just be the humidity.

After ducking into a convenience store for an ice cream, she ends up on a bench outside a small patch of green that boasts far too many advertisements and far too few kids for her to consider it a real park. As she works her way to the chocolate surprise promised at the bottom of the waffle cone, a family of five passes, clearly tourists. The youngest looks barely four, probably on the edge of a tantrum, but the parents pay him no mind, chattering animatedly about one of the buildings nearby. She makes out some architecture lingo before they're too far to hear, though she watches them until they turn a corner, three blocks down. The girls, both preteens, have their phones out the entire time as if they would rather be anywhere else, but she sees them sneaking curious peeks at window displays and graffiti whenever their parents aren't looking.

A trio of teens passes by not too long after that, lightly arguing about a logo in a nearby store. As she watches, one of the boys hops onto the other's back while the laughing girl ruffles both of their hair and tries to trip them. Further back, a woman shouts into her phone in a language Jade can't identify, looking on the verge of tears but keeping her voice eerily controlled. Over there, an older man twirls his fingers while listening to his headphones with a determined set to his mouth — so deep in thought that he nearly walks into traffic without looking.

She watches people come and go, all engrossed in their little dramas, all with full, complicated lives riddled with hopes and conflicts and hangups that she could never hope to extrapolate from just a few seconds of looking. As another family walks by, her chest clenches against a sting of loneliness. Eight and a half million people. Eight and a half million people in the city, and not a single soul who would know her name.

But then, hadn't that been the point? She'll find new friends, make new memories.

Her last apartment hadn't been a home; it'd been a waystation for the weary. She'd spent almost eight years there, longer than she'd lived anywhere else — if you count all the times she and Jimmy had switched rooms as kids, or those two years when she'd moved into the attic just because she could. No, after college she'd needed something to stay solid and constant while the rest of her fell apart — except now that she feels reasonably pieced back together, she can't imagine walking down those streets of Chicago for much longer, not with the shadows of a breakdown echoing off every corner, every damn brick of pavement.

_Hey, remember when you woke up screaming every night? When your skin was almost as white as your teeth? When you smashed a vase on the floor and stomped on all the flowers even though they weren't even meant for you?_

That city, those people… They've seen too many of her unsteady years for her to ever be able to forget what she's running from. It would always be an undercurrent in any conversation she would have with her old coworkers, in any sideways look from the grocery store cashier, in any hello from the neighbor down the hall. And that had always been the goal — to forget, to move on, to live life as though the Academy had never happened.

There's not much chance at this point of that ever happening. But she'll be damned if she doesn't try her hardest.

With a new spring in her step, she heads down another unexplored street in hopes of finding something edible for her increasingly rumbling stomach. A fast food joint, another one, a high-priced restaurant — a diner that looks vastly out of place in the glass lobby of a skyscraper… She ends up stopping a few blocks down, her attention caught by a food truck that's surrounded by enough people to attest to either the quality of its bagels or the busyness of the surrounding area. Maybe both.

A quick snack, she reasons, a few light stretches, and then she should probably head home. She could probably find a place to put together some of the shelves after all; maybe in one of the empty rooms, and then she could wheel them back—

"...Jade?"

Her head turns automatically, before logic can tell it that there's no way the tentative greeting could be aimed at her; no one it could possibly have come from. The perpetrator turns out to be a man on her left — an unbuttoned collar, a gray suit jacket slung over his arm, staring perplexed at her with strikingly blue eyes and just enough stubble to look like he just stepped out of a magazine.

She becomes so preoccupied with the sudden unrest in her chest that she forgets to recognize him — and she might not have at all, if not for the purple scarf hanging off his shoulders — but as the moments tick away and his half-open mouth starts curving into an intrigued smile, flickers of familiarity light up within her.

Eventually, she manages a stunned, "Ike." It's more of a gasp than a statement as she struggles to take in the picture — his stance, his windswept hair, the sunglasses he still keeps hooked over the top of his vest. A half-laugh escapes her before she starts grinning, too. Of course this is what would happen. Why had she expected anything else? "Wow," she mutters, slowly shaking her head. "I didn't— Wow."

"Would you look at that," he whispers seemingly to himself, gaze bouncing over her without ever resting on any one spot for more than half a second. "Of all the food stands in all the… What are you doing in New York, Ellsworth?"

"I—" What  _is_  she doing in New York? "I moved here."

His eyes lock on hers. "No kidding?"

"Yeah. Just now," she adds, trying to remember something — anything. What does she usually do with her hands? "Like three days ago. All of my stuff is in boxes."

"Huh." He shifts his weight, transfers the jacket to his other arm to extend his hand to her with a smile that seems to have brightened. "Well, allow me to welcome you to the best city in the world, then," he says. "I trust you were going to hit me up within two weeks had we not run into each other like this — otherwise I'm going to be  _very_  insulted."

She chuckles and shakes the hand with an apologetic grimace. "Actually, I'd kind of forgotten you lived here."  _I'd kind of forgotten you existed_ , she wishes she could say, but they both know better than to believe that.

He clutches a fist to his heart, scoffing indignantly. "The  _nerve_."

"Yeah, I'm sure you're heartbroken," she says more steadily now, turning back to the line. "Don't take it personally, though — I've forgotten where everybody's from. It's all probably somewhere in an address book in one of the boxes, but…"

"But you didn't spend fifth period sneaking away into broom closets with everybody else," he finishes, his grin significantly less cocky and more nostalgic than she expects it to be — it jitters her system. "Or did you?" he asks, all softness gone, only mischief. "Is good ol' Hunter better at keeping secrets than advertised?"

"Shut up," she manages through a laugh and smacks his arm — and she's probably touching Armani now instead of a uniform that never fit him right all the way, and her nails are long and clean instead of covered in chipped nail polish, but there's something so effortless about the gesture that it makes the minute that's elapsed since she laid eyes on him feel like several hours.

He studies her for a moment, leaning back. "Well, see, now I'm just offended that I'm not special enough to be the only one whose location you forgot to remember," he says, humor thick on his tongue.

And just like that, it's almost like it's ten years earlier.

She barely spares him a scathing glance as she moves up the line. "It'll be nice to see you on the other side of offense for a change." Wasn't it once on her bucket list to see him throw an honest-to-god hissy fit, just to see what it would look like? So many schemes she'd plotted, so many ways to annoy him… Funny, the things that used to be important.

"Hey, I'll have you know"—he raises an indignant finger—"I have only been involved in  _three_ lawsuits since I took over the company, and one of them wasn't even about anything I  _said_."

"Your mother must be so proud," she deadpans before ordering an everything bagel.

"I certainly hope so," he agrees brightly. "Pride's a sin, and the more of those pesky little buggers she accumulates, the better her heathen ass's chance of salsaing straight into that hell she's always on about." He raises an imaginary glass.

Jade gives him a look. "It's always so fun when you gush about your family."

"I know, isn't it." He flashes one of his toothy, knowingly devilish grins. "Just wait until you hear about my long-lost brother."

She pauses rifling through her disorganized wallet. "You. Brother."

"Yeeep." He plays with the end of his tie. "Turns out all my idealistic notions about dear old dad being a chaste gentleman before giving up his virtue to the  _one true love of his life_  were somewhat misguided. In fact, he may have even been a teen parent," he continues, a degree of mockery in his tone. "Not quite sure how old Abraham actually was, what with all that time-travel, but the other son is pushing forty now, so… I figure, at least I finally one-upped Dad on the moral scale by  _not_ getting some poor high school girl knocked up." He shrugs, resigned, and then abruptly turns to smirk at her. "And before you say anything — yes, I'm certain I didn't."

Damn it — that's exactly what she'd been thinking. "Yeesh, it never ends with you people," she says instead, trying to picture this stranger who would look half-Ike-ish. Her imagination's not that good. "The guy — he anything like you?"

His expression doesn't falter for a second. "Not a bit."

"Then I think I'm gonna like him," she decides and turns to pay the vendor, but there's a smile hiding on her lips.

"You would, actually," Ike says, immune to her insults, and leans against the counter. "Indie music fan, history nerd, high school teacher with a bad taste in suits — hey, that was your type, right?" he teases, and her fingers nearly falter realizing that that's about Marcus, that he still remembers something she only told him once, half a lifetime ago. "Doesn't even want a piece of the family fortune — can you believe it?" he continues without so much as taking a breath, like he just can't help himself. "Just to  _'get to know me'_ , so that his  _'son'_  can have  _'more family than he did'_  or something."

"How dare the bastard."

"I knew you would be on my side," he says with a completely straight face, then snaps his fingers and slaps them against his thigh. "Ah, drat, too bad you didn't  _literally just_  move here from Chicago,  _where he lives_ , otherwise I would  _so totally_  introduce the two of you." His voice stays completely flat.

"I never said I still lived in Chicago," she says absentmindedly as they move away from the register, to the eating area. "For all you know, I might've moved to, I dunno, Poughkeepsie or something,"

He scoffs. "Jade, please — Facebook knows everything," he says. "A twenty-first century gal like you should really have learned that by now; can't use that small-town upbringing as an excuse forever, you know."

What she hears in that isn't the condescension but instead: "Aw, so you checked up on me?" She layers the sweetness thick on her face as she turns back to him.

He hesitates, caught. "I… may have. Once or twice. But only because I was hoping to find nudes," he adds hastily.

"Right," she says. "Not because you missed me or anything."

"Nnnope," he agrees, grinning. "Not at all." But then he gets this look in his eye — like something obvious has just occurred to him, something so wholly self-evident that he might not bother saying it at all, for that would mean admitting that this is the first he's thought of it. She can see him practically vibrate with this new discovery, teetering on the precipice of giving into it, and evidently, he falls over the edge, because that same look is still in his eye when he leans on his elbow, shifts toward her, and asks, too quickly, "Hey, what are you doing right now?"

"Getting a crappy bagel, duh." She takes a decent bite and scarfs it down. "No offense," she says, mouth full, over her shoulder to the grumpy vendor who may or may not have heard her, and may or may not care. "Monumental life event, you know — my first New York street food," Jade continues. "I'm gonna put it on Facebook and everything. No, actually, Instagram — hey, mind taking the picture? I'll let you choose the filter," she offers, trying her best to bat her eyelashes.

"Cute." He angles himself toward her, elbow still resting on the cart. "How about instead of _millennial insanity_ , you and I go get a slightly less crappy bagel somewhere else? Or, in case you'd prefer something more substantial, perhaps an evening out at one of the many fine restaurants New York has to offer," he proposes, inspecting a fingernail. "I own most of them; it'd be a shame not to take advantage of the free dining and catch up, reminisce — especially with how expensive I've heard buying boxes can be at this late stage of capitalism."

She nods along with a knowing look. "See, I would, but that sounds  _suspiciously_ like you buying me dinner," she points out, and when he starts fighting a grin like a busted five-year-old, she can't help but narrow her eyes, holding his gaze. "Wait, are you?"

There's a longer pause there than she remembers being used to once upon a time, when he'd had every word ready before there was ever anything to respond to, when she'd kept wishing that he'd get dumbstruck, just once. He looks at her now with those careful, piercing eyes, and she expects to feel like she's being evaluated, like he's measuring her against some confusing standard unknown to anyone but him, but it mostly just seems as if he's too busy taking in the sight to form an answer.

Finally, he says, "Haven't decided yet," and for some reason she feels as though the thought excites him.

The longer she stares at him, puzzled — at the faint new scar on his cheekbone, at the little wrinkles starting to appear around his eyes — the more a sense of wonder envelops her, too. It almost feels like it used to, but it's not. She hasn't seen him in five years, and even then, just barely. She has no clue how he's changed, or if he's even changed at all.

Once, it would've seemed inevitable that they'd end up wrapped around each other in a tangle that's always been beyond words or definitions or boundaries, from the very first moment they'd met. She can feel it sparking beneath her skin still, something between them that's too little and too much at once, that shifts and expands and shrinks as it sees fit — something she has never, ever been able to explain to herself or anyone else in any way that made the slightest bit of sense.

But they're not kids anymore. There are no broom closets to sneak off to, no roommates to make half-baked excuses to. They aren't ruled by greedy bodies with insatiable desires now. It wouldn't be rebellious or clandestine this time, just the bare bones of whatever it actually is, if it's ever been anything at all. Maybe crossing that line would be too close, too vulnerable; maybe there's no use in opening up those wounds again, with all the unsaid things she's locked away so deep that it might just be the same as forgetting them in the first place. Maybe they know better these days. They could part ways here, just two people who went to high school once, and that could be the end of it.

There's a choice now.

That she could, that they  _might_ —it's thrilling enough to have it out there in the open, when once she'd rather have faced basements and nurses than to admit that he meant anything to her at all. And yet, after all that time that it's felt like fire — all-consuming, ravaging fire — is all that's ever been between them, maybe all that there ever could be… like nothing and no one could stand in its way, least of all themselves…

Then that he wouldn't— that she couldn't— that they  _shouldn't_ … Well, that's a thought that drives her dizzy with power, like omnipotence coursing through her fingertips, as though they had become gods after all.

"I haven't either," she whispers, mouth suddenly dry, chest suddenly restless.

His gaze lingers on her lips for a long moment, then returns to her eyes. The world falls away and drifts into a gray silence as they stare at each other, the air thick with endless questions neither of them bother to separate from the rest. There's no conscious thought in her mind but for the brilliance of his icy eyes, no sensation but for weightlessness under this pressure of possibility. Everything she's ever buried comes bubbling to the surface in the face of that unbroken connection, and she has to swallow it back down again lest she say something— she doesn't even know what. Something stupid, something reckless, something she doesn't mean.

"I guess we better go find out," he finally mutters, slowly tearing his gaze away. And then he straightens and stretches out his arm with a daring smirk — and the world snaps back into focus like a rubber band that's been released. All of a sudden there's a crowd bustling around them again, and they're just two adults having a conversation. "Shall we?" he asks. " _M'lady_."

She hesitates on the heels of her feet, then snakes her elbow around his like they were old friends — and who knows, maybe they are. "Lead the way," she says with a click of her tongue, falling easily back into a familiar rhythm. "But, y'know, if I'm gonna be potentially paying a hundred bucks for a single meal to save my dignity and other boring things I care about now, you'd better take me someplace that's worth it."

* * *

 

The idea of having fancy dinner with Ike had always struck Jade as somewhat ridiculous, like trying to build a helicopter on a deserted island. Sure, it'd make an interesting movie pitch, and sure, it could conceivably happen, but how many other unlikely things would have to happen first to suspend the disbelief? The odds that you'd be stranded in a remote place and just happen to have all the right spare parts, the exact know-how, and a lack of other, much simpler escape options… Just short of impossible. And so, back in the day, she never actually managed to think about what going on a real date with the bastard might be like — at least not for long enough to come up with any expectations.

Good thing, too, because the reality… The reality is something else.

Nothing blows up, gets set on fire, or becomes a loud enough fight for them to be asked to leave. No ghosts show up; no one pulls out a gun. They don't even end up hurriedly and ill-advisedly trying to undress each other in a locked bathroom between courses — which, y'know — that isn't a good thing  _or_ a bad thing; it's just… a fact. (The last time they'd seen each other, when Jade had invited everyone to her college graduation and Ike just  _happened_ to be in Chicago that day, well, things had gone differently.)

After a casual stroll through the busy streets, where she picks his brain about every single tiny thing they see, he takes her to a little Italian place on the corner of some street and other. At first she thinks he's joking, because there's nothing on the menu but pizza, pizza, and more pizza — and believe it or not, she's had that before, Ike — but it turns out to be a series of experimental tiny pizzas with delicacy toppings straight out of a manic chef's drug-induced hallucinations, and eventually she has to admit: he's nailed it.

They spend their evening lounging at a cozy booth in a corner of the restaurant, sharing stories and scrolling through old photos over red wine and adventurous food. Jade lifts her feet to the seat opposite her the moment she realizes she can; Ike mumbles something about farmgirl manners before scooting closer to see her phone better. Everyone from the Academy has mostly lost touch over the years, as you do with old classmates you didn't know that well and maybe tried to kill a couple of times, but it's good to remind themselves every once in a while, as Ike puts it, that the experience hadn't been just a dream.

( _More like a nightmare_ , Jade adds, and then they start sharing their least forgettable nightly terrors, competing to see whose mind is more disturbing these days. There is no clear winner, which she thinks should be kind of worrisome given Ike's history, but instead it just feels nice. Wholesome, against all odds.)

Halfway through the second mini-pizza, they've moved onto recounting their most embarrassing moments since parting ways; Jade's mostly consist of singing too loudly in public, whereas Ike supposedly "doesn't have any," so he freely dispenses other people's and nearly makes Jade snort some of that wine out her nose. ( _Very classy_ , he says as she tries to avoid making the tablecloth look like a bloody crime scene, but he's having trouble holding back laughter too.) When the fourth dish arrives, they're onto daydreams of distant futures and bittersweet might-have-beens; and then, by the time they make it outside — decidedly free of charge, a little drunk, still half-laughing about something someone said this one time — the sun has already set and left them in a cobalt dusk thick with the scent of summer.

Jade fully expects to be slammed against the wall about two seconds after the doors close behind them — to be kissed brainless and desperate or, at the very least, taken home to do the same there, now that they've both made their choices and those choices seem to have never been a question at all. And so, truth be told, she doesn't quite know what to think when Ike spends a good minute staring pensively at her, then hands back her phone with a little, "Ah!" as though he'd forgotten he was still holding it from earlier, and says, with a little smile, "Don't be a stranger, Ellsworth."

Wait. That's not what the rules are here. No.

She's not used to genuinely enjoying spending time with him, not without looming death or bad teenage judgment for an excuse. That's not something life has prepared her for, not something she'd ever thought it should. But the dawning realization that they could say goodnight, right now, here, on this corner, and she would still go to sleep thinking about him with a smile — it does a good enough job knocking her off her feet that all she can manage in response is a soft, certain, "I won't be."

And she means it. Even though the restlessness is back — because this thing, whatever the fuck it is, used to be her constant, a turbulent stream in an ocean of chaos that was her life, and now that there seems to be solid ground under her feet, the calm feels eerie — there is no part of her that doesn't want to accidentally run into him again. Soon.

"And if…" He gives a nonchalant shrug, hands stuffed into the pockets of his suit, as the weight of the silence settles between them. She's never thought him capable of leaving any word unsaid. "Well, you know where to find me," he says, nodding to her phone, and when she glances down, his contact information blinks up at her under the name GREATEST MAN IN THE WORLD.

She chuckles, an exasperatedly amused sound that can only come from knowing that some things never change. "I guess I do." By the time she looks back up at him, he's already spinning on his heel and cheerily walking away, sparing her but one last smirk. Still half-shaking her head at the human disaster in front of her, she exhales deeply, runs a hand through her hair, and takes a good look around. One way, then the other, a glance at the single low-res image of a New York City map on her phone…

Slowly, her fond expression fades.

"Um," she says, a bit unsteadily. "Unfortunately, I can't say the same for my apartment."

She hears the steps halt, then a scrape of his patented one-eighty on one heel against asphalt. "Don't tell me."

"I kind of… maybe forgot to look where I was going when we walked here," she admits with half a laugh. He stares amused at her, twelve paces away, then takes his first step forward before she even starts saying, "Can you…?"

"Yes, yes, invaluable expertise of a native New Yorker, coming through," he says, quick strides approaching. "I suppose I should be flattered that you were so captivated by my excellent company as to get lost in the biggest city on the  _continent,"_ he scathes and eyerolls with a small shake of his head. "All right, so where exactly is this fabled new casa of yours?" She holds her phone out and, with at least an eighty-percent certainty, points. "Oh, that's not too far," he says, looking around and then back at the map. "Okay, so what you gotta do is go three blocks this way, and then—"

"Can I… not?" she asks, shifting her weight. She can feel him staring weirdly before she looks back up at him. "I know, but it's, just, my phone's almost dead and, well, you know how bad my sense of direction is." It had been subpar as a child, but years of dream-walking through magical spaces outside the realm of physics never exactly helped the matter.

He gives her a look. "Jade, it's literally just rectangles with numbers on one side and pretentious names on the other."

"Yeah, well, you can tell that to my dead body when you see it on the news tomorrow," she says, because if he's gonna casually throw out shit about Marcus, then he should really remember this, too. (And if he's not gonna kiss her, then the least he could do is stop looking so handsome in these last sunlit rays.) "I've seen way too many news specials to risk getting lost in this hellscape in the dark."

He blinks at her a couple of times, opens his mouth, then evidently resigns himself to not furthering the debate. "Okay, fine, whatever. Then go to this subway station here, and take the fourth line to—"

"Yeah, that'swhat I'm gonna do — try to figure out the New York City subway system for the first time by myself at nine-thirty on a Friday night." She reins in an elaborate eyeroll, because at least he's trying to help her, but it's hard to be objective when he's standing so close, when she can smell his cologne. "No, I need something else, somethi— Oh, duh!" She slaps her forehead. "I did basically write off a hundred bucks for tonight—"

"Ouch," he whines with an amused grin.

"—I'll just get a taxi," she decides, ignoring him, and already starts looking out to the traffic.

He squints at her and gives what might have been a double take, were they not a foot apart. "Are you  _actually_ joking?" he demands.

She pauses her search to give him a brief, distracted glance. "What?"

"A taxi? For  _this_? I— Who manages your budge—?" He gives her a quick, suspicious once-over and huffs. "Come on, let's go," he orders with a passing wave. "It'll take, like, twenty minutes."

"Wait—" She turns to him, but he's already strutting away in the opposite direction he had before. "What are you—"

"Time's a-wastin'," he reminds cheerily and turns toward her again, still stepping backwards, hands stuffed in his pockets — the pinnacle of childlike innocence. "Do you  _want_ a safe voyage through this 'hellscape' or not?" He gestures to a row of flower pots by his feet with painstaking mockery. Fifteen paces away now.

And because he shows every sign of disappearing around the corner with or without her, she allows herself only two seconds of gritted teeth before she dashes after him, yelling, "Wait up, asshole!"

"That's 'white knight' to you, missy!" he shouts back without bothering to slow down a bit. He even skips backwards away when she starts catching up to him, and in a completely surprising turn of events, he then crashes into a trashcan and nearly falls over.

Jade skids to a stop and bursts out guffawing as he tries to right himself — limbs swinging around in a whirlpool like he's on freaking  _Looney Tunes_ — before he finally gives up and falls onto the steel bucket with a grunt. It's so mesmerizing to watch that it doesn't even occur to her to offer a hand up until he's already gotten there by himself — but she does manage to snap a picture of the debacle for future blackmail purposes before her phone beeps out its dying breath, which definitely says something about her priorities.

"What was that about knights you were saying?" she asks, hip cocked, as Ike smooths out his slacks, straightens his collar, and stalks past her — face-forward and everything.

"A taxi," he repeats to himself disbelievingly, as though nothing had happened.

"Shut up." She bumps her shoulder into his, and he bumps his hip into hers — and he's taller than her now, and she knows how to do her taxes, but his nose is still crooked, and she still gets a little knot in her throat whenever  _"Welcome to the Black Parade"_  comes on the radio — and they're both still too good at saying too little.

* * *

 

Together, they wind through the unexpectedly empty streets of New York in the warring lights of flickering orange street lamps against a dimming blue sky. She stops frequently to stare at things; he chimes in with commentary — sometimes relevant, but mostly not. His gestures are a mile wide, as always, and she takes advantage of the free space on the vast sidewalks by sneaking up to tickle his sides after a particularly snarky comment. She revels in the sound of his yelp, wishing she could've recorded that, too, but — well, she should have known better. One limb, and another, and thirty seconds later she's squealing in his headlock, feet kicking the open air with gravity-defying force that her old soccer coach would be proud of while Ike gets his revenge.

It's almost as though they were alone in this, the city that Jade had been taught growing up was the most populous in the world.

He grabs her hand when she veers into traffic a bit too confidently for someone who's had two glasses of wine, and he doesn't release it until seven blocks past the junction where she had narrowly avoided mountainous hospital bills. Their intertwined fingers swing between them so easily that she doesn't even notice until it's almost over, and when he finally lets go to start some ramble about the street art on the nearest corner, her palm tingles in the absence. She doesn't try to take his hand again.

"You know, Isaac," she says at some point. "It just occurred to me that you're technically walking me home in the twilight of a summer night, and I'm pretty sure I hear an acoustic guitar over there." She waves to a subway entrance. "Next thing I know, you'll be draping your jacket over my shoulders."

He studies her for a moment, then swings one casual arm around them instead. "If that was a hint, then, with all due respect, Ellsworth — keep dreaming," he announces with a quick grin.

And though she had only meant to tease him, in the confident way that one can only ever joke about things they know to be impossible, her throat is suddenly too dry for the next quip on the back of her tongue. Too conscious of his fingers on her arm — rubbing just barely, like he's hoping she won't notice — she steals his designer sunglasses out of his vest and his phone out of his back pocket, and then proceeds to take the cringiest selfies of the two of them to undercut the suspicion that his mere arm is warming her up more than his flimsy jacket ever could have.

She fills his camera roll with duck faces and peace signs worthy of internet infamy as he tries to keep amusement off his face. Soon, he refuses to look at her at all, but she can tell he's wearing the same busted grin as before — an admission that he deserves every embarrassing frame for becoming someone they both would've made fun of ten years earlier. That, or he's plotting how to unravel himself from her sense of humor, which is admittedly still stuck in middle grade. Either way, he only starts looking at her like a crazy person when she's taken one with her lips puckered a hair's away from his cheek, and even then he doesn't drop his arm.

He doesn't drop his arm, and so when she's done mocking him, her own winds around his waist as if it were the easiest thing in the world — and she has to start wondering if this is trouble, if she's in trouble.

* * *

 

And then it's over. Only two more blocks later, she pauses staring at the lights reflected in his stubble — wondering if he'd forgotten to shave that morning or if that's just how he wears his face these days — and spares a casual glance to the surroundings from her cozy spot against his side. Instantly, she skids to a stop in front of a lively brownstone so suddenly that his body breaks away from hers just by sheer inertia.

Surely the walk had been nowhere near twenty minutes; surely they've discovered another time loop — even though that was supposed to stop happening, even though somebody normal would have noticed that in New York of all places. Maybe the building's haunted and it's manifested right in front of their eyes where it hadn't been a minute ago. Maybe…

"What's wrong, Jade?" Ike asks, halted a few paces ahead.

…maybe she'd just forgotten to look where she was going. Again.

"This is it," she explains with some doubt, and then resignation, and then some regret. If she'd just picked that other apartment on 148th, they'd still have a ways to go. "That's my window, up there."

"Oh." So much for his navigation skills. "Oh, I thought it was a few blocks over. I, uh… Whatever. Nice neighborhood." He says it like it's just something to say, but then he actually looks around with a heavy exhale, and his expression starts to shift. "Wait, holy shit — I'm actually kind of impressed, Ellsworth."

"Yeah," she says, rubbing her skin to mitigate the sudden absence of his warmth. "I guess as far as hellscapes go, this is pretty cool."

He starts absently nodding in agreement, then sharply looks back to her, eyes narrowing. "That better not have been intentional," he warns.

She shrugs with a small smile.

"I'm just saying," he continues, gesturing again. "My carefully cultivated aesthetic has no space for bad puns. I would have expected that from Hunter, but you always struck me as a bit better than that."

"Well, Ike, you know what they say"— she pats his shoulder amicably —"the lowest form of humor is  _still_ humor."

"Yes, I've always considered 'them'quite full of shit," he says without missing a beat and stuffs his hands into his pockets, surveying the street.

She snorts. "You think everyone's full of shit."

"Well, that's because I—" Then his brow creases as he notices something behind her. "With good reason, actually," he amends, eyes narrowing. His gaze darts back to her, then back to it, and then back and forth a few more times like he's trying to solve one of those  _Spot the difference!_  exercises on the backs of cereal boxes. Then, finally: "See, I was about to say how I'm glad that we made it home and that I won't have to make acquaintance with your corpse on the television in the coming days, but, uh… Now I'm not so sure." He nods to the neighboring building, where a giant green tube man waves at them in the wind through an open window.

She shifts to study the decor, briefly overcome by a strange sense of deja vu. Surely an inflatable monstrosity has nothing on the horrors she used to see in her dream-walks, and yet… "I think I met those people yesterday," she mutters, scrolling through her recent memories. "They were so nice. I think the woman wished me good luck with finding a husband." She muffles her snicker with a shrug. "Guess you never know what kinda freaks hide behind polite smiles and banana bread."

"You and me included," he points out wryly.

"Yeah, well, if they've killed half as many people as we have, then I might have to find a new place to live," she says, always surprised by how easily the words roll off her tongue, how simple it is to mention her darkest secrets with him here. "Either way, the sanctity of my dreams may be forever destroyed after this."

He hums in agreement. "Well, hey, at least there wasn't much of that left to begin with," he allows, and for the first time tonight, she notices the dark circles beneath his eyes. Then he shifts back to her, and it's a little ridiculous how much he looks like a windswept model just then — with his casual stance and his loosened tie and his potentially genuine concern for her well-being. "Anyway… I guess this is goodnight." He exhales. "Again."

"Yeah, I guess," she says, feeling once more like the world's snapped back into place after going hazy without her noticing. "And, hey, thanks for walking with me. That was actually kinda sweet."

"Eugh"— he visibly recoils —"do me a favor and remove that word from any context remotely related to me ever."

"Sure thing," she says easily. "That was really rad of you. A truly  _gnarly_ thing you did for me."

He can't help chuckling as his head raises to the darkening sky in exasperation. "Wow, you're just… gonna take a sledgehammer to my reputation the minute I bring you anywhere, aren't ya."

"Oh, yeah," she promises, poking him lightly in the chest. "Sledgehammer, tractor… oh,  _wrecking ball_." She sticks her tongue out in her best impression of Miley. "Yup, I'm sticking with that last one," she decides. "It's quicker, harder — certainly more fun in the nude," she adds dryly.

His lips twitch. "Hah, well, to be fair — most things are."

And he smiles, really smiles at her, like he's hoping they'll play hot potato with the conversation all night, all day, all week—and suddenly, inexplicably she wants nothing more in the entire world than to kiss him right then and there, even just for a second or two.

It's not the usual fire he's always ignited in her; it's not even the desire to have things be the way they were before, when kissing him had been self-evident instead of a complicated question. It's something new, this irresistible urge to plant her mouth on his and see what will happen, just for the heck of it. She's moments away from crumbling her control and satisfying the curiosity, unsteadiness be damned, but then her eyes accidentally drift lower and… "Hey, you're— Are you bleeding?" she demands.

"Hmm? Oh." He glances down at the heel of his hand. "It's just a scrape. I must've gotten it when I, uh… earlier."

She grabs his hand to get a closer look and frowns at what she finds. " _How?_ It's basically sliced open."

"Oh, it's fine; I barely feel it," he says. "I think someone just smashed a bottle into the bin. Shards everywhere."

Her face hardens. "Jesus, why do people do that? Where I'm from, we just throw our bottles out the car window for other vehicles to slash their tires on. Y'know, like normalfolk."

"People are idiots, Leslie," he mutters quietly. "Ah, that reminds me, I haven't had waffles in much too long. We should do that sometime."

Jade cranes her head for a better look at the cut, forgetting to wonder if that's his way of asking her out again. "Okay, but seriously, that looks like it's gonna scar, and a trash can doesn't sound like the most sanitized environment; you should probably get that cleaned." She bites her upper lip, trying to squeeze back the words, but they come out anyway. "Do you, uh… Do you know how to do that?" She feels like a douche even asking that to a seemingly functional adult — but, in her defense, she once saw the guy get punched with a rock and then promptly wash the open wound with hand sanitizer.

"Relax, Jade," he says, gesturing so confidently that, for about two seconds, she almost does. But then: "I'm pretty sure it was a beer bottle — aka it was alcohol — aka I am  _good_." The last word is punctuated by an OK sign.

Her jaw drops open. "Oh my god, that's  _not how that works_ ," she manages after a moment, all lust evaporated. "Holy shit, how are you even alive. 'Taxi,' my ass." She rubs her face, then her hair, and to her credit, manages to only chortle twice. "Okay, you know what, come with me, right now. That's not a request," she says and stomps up the stairs to her building without bothering to look whether he's following. "I'm sure there must be someantiseptic somewherein  _one_ of those boxes."

* * *

 

"Wow, you really weren't kidding about the mess," Ike says the moment he steps into her apartment, a couple dozen steps behind her.

She pauses rummaging through a bag on the counter to survey the sight through a newcomer's eyes. The large living room is a mosaic of boxes in all shapes and sizes, stacked on top of each other and propped up against the walls. In the adjoining kitchen, every countertop is littered with packing paper and cooking gadgets in various stages of cleanliness. The one lonely plant she's managed to unpack looks like it's weathered a snowstorm, and fingerprints scatter over every other whitened surface like a crime scene being dusted. Everything smells of paint.

"I told you I just moved in," she says with a bit of an edge to her voice, because what normal person has a new apartment ready in three days? She's not a celebrity with a posse or a comic book character with superspeed. She doesn't even know anyone in New York to invite over yet — besides him, apparently. Three months is more like what she thought she'd be working with.

"No, I mean, I like it," he says quickly. "Nice garbage chic vibe — very in right now. I hear if you enter Kesha's new house, you'll be tracking glitter everywhere for days." He drags a finger over a plastic-wrapped lamp. "Pretty sure Shia LaBeouf has an entire room with nothing but cardboard furniture," he adds with a hint of admiration, as though he were considering doing the same.

She gives him a look, not quite sure if he's joking. "Ike, you do know I'm not done decorating—"

"Well, yeah, obviously," he says, picking something off the floor to examine it. "Otherwise you would've hung up the art by now."

"I don't have any art." No need to rub it in.

"Exactly, I wholeheartedly agree," he says easily. "Art doesn't truly become art until it's displayed as such, and this piece was clearly just on the floor."

"Jesus, Ike, I'm trying to find the damn—!" But then she catches sight of him holding the rectangle against the wall and her annoyance dissolves on her tongue.

He looks at it the way he looks at anything he ever bothers to pay attention to — like it's the only thing that matters, like he could unravel the mysteries of the universe if he simply  _saw_ it hard enough. She's been on the receiving end of that conviction more than once, and she can't help wondering if this piece of plastic has the same primal urge to prove him right, to tear itself open and flood him with the stuff that things are made of — every atom and every particle… Every word and every touch that ever meant anything.

She watches as he scans the wall for hooks in complete earnest, holding the bubble wrap tenderly between his fingers. He'd told her once that he used to wonder if he was made of anything at all.

Her voice softens. "Ike, it's not a— Have you never played with that before?"

When he just stares at her with that little pucker above his nose, she maneuvers the minefield of box piles to his side and nearly knocks into him in an effort to take his hand. His fingers are warm under hers as she guides them over an air pocket, careful to avoid his wound. The plastic pops, and his pleased little jump at the sound goes on the growing list of things she wishes she could've recorded.

"Oh, neat," he says and squeezes a few more bubbles with a small smile. "Interactive. I knew I'd seen these somewhere before."

"That's somehow the saddest thing I've ever heard," she muses, wondering what other essential childhood things he's missed out on. Pokemon? Snowfights? Love, certainly. "Guess I shouldn't be surprised that you've never had to move your own shit, though."

Pop, pop, pop. "Yes, well — in my defense, I usually destroyed whatever belongings I had before they could be moved. Preferably by arson."

She has to hold back a smile. "I don't think you understand what 'in my defense' means, Ike." But then — how many buckets of _her_ old things had she set on fire back in the day?

"I don't think  _you_ understand how many man-hours of monotonous packing I saved my nannies, Jade," he points out, moving down the grid in tidy little diagonals with the utmost focus. "Ugh, and the city's economic benefit of replacing everything! Really, I was a martyr."

She nods solemnly, patting his shoulder. "Right up there with Jesus."

His lips twitch. "Look, if you're going to patronize me, at least pick someone I wasn't brought up to revile," he says, and then he finally raises his gaze back to her. It's sharp and unflinching, like everything else about him — it cuts right through all the hard work she's put in over the evening to catch and contain the butterflies roaming in her chest. One tiny opening in the net, and there, out they fly. She's still holding the bubble wrap with one hand, the other on his shoulder. If it moved an inch, she could pull on his collar and tug his mouth down to hers.

He looks almost smug, like he knows exactly what she's thinking. "Do you need help?" he asks casually, as though it's a reminder. "Looking for… whatever it is you're looking for." He somehow makes it sound like a sincere gesture and a laden question all at once, like he's afraid that what she's looking for might be him.

With some effort, she pulls herself away — because apparently this is the game they're playing now, and there's no way she'll ever stoop to exhibiting less self-control than Ike of all people. "Hah, well, as confidence-inspiring as that offer is, I, uh… have a system, believe it or not."

He makes a show of looking around the room and then says, "...Or not."

Jade takes a few steps to the nearest box and hands him another piece of bubble wrap. "Just keep yourself busy while I find the stupid antiseptic." Which is hiding… somewhere. She strikes the two boxes in the kitchen from her mental list and stalks past him to another one in the middle of the room, labeled FIRE HAZARDS.

"Aye, aye, captain," he says, settling into one of her two unpacked chairs as though it were the centerpiece of a five-star hotel lobby instead of a footnote in the tornado wreckage that is this apartment. "So, if I may ask"— he doesn't bother to wait for agreement —"if this interior design isn't the finished product, then what can I expect to see in a few… days?" he guesses. "Years?"

She spares him a look over her shoulder and finds him quite unabashedly staring at her ass. "Wow, you've  _really_ never moved your own shit," she mutters and digs out the high-grade olive oil to remember to put into the kitchen. "And I don't really know yet. Not everybody can afford new, perfectly tailored furniture every time they move house, you know. Or pick it out from halfway across the country," she mutters.

"Halfway? Please, a third at best," he corrects. "Also I think I can help you out there — it seems to me that the feel you're going for so far is 'uncomfortable.'" He shifts in the red chair, grimacing mildly. "Seriously, what is this thing made out of?"

"Hey, don't badmouth Betsy," she chastises without turning, elbow deep in skincare and hairspray. "I stole her from my dad's house junior year of college, and she's been with me through a lot, okay?"

She can practically hear his eyeroll. "You named your chair  _Betsy_?" he repeats. "What, was 'Muriel' taken?"

"Not me — my mom," she says, brushing the familiar pang in her chest aside like she would any other piece of dust. "Right after I was born; I practically grew up in that chair. You don't mess with tradition." She pauses. "And you don't mess with Betsy, so if you're gonna be a dick about it, get out and sit somewhere else."

"But it's so much fun messing with things," he protests, with such obvious enjoyment that she glares back at him until he obediently gets up with a peace-making gesture. "Fine, fine, but if it makes any difference, I wasn't ojecting to Betsy's existence, merely the prospect of sitting in her," he clarifies. "God knows my own apartment has plenty of useless furniture — ask anyone who's ever tried to make me host a dinner party for the old farts at work." He grins. "She'd fit right in."

Jade shoots him another long look. A dinner party, she thinks with a little snort. Ike being polite to anyone, under any circumstances, for long enough to host one. Yeah, she'd pay good money to see that — or to know how many assistants have been fired for suggesting the idea. "Useless — that's what, like a bidet?" she asks, pushing the hazard box away and reaching for another one.

"No, 'useless' as in the opposite of functional," he says behind her, closer than she'd expected. "You know — see-through glass doors. Tables with crooked surfaces. My couch looks like an S no matter what angle you see it from," he adds with what she thinks might be pride as he kneels on the floor next to her, sneaking a peek into the new box. "First thing people ever notice, but I have yet to meet anyone actually willing to sit on it."

Big surprise there; his description sounds more like something out of her old dreams than an object constrained by the conventional number of dimensions. "Why would you even bother with something like that?" she asks, a little annoyed by his proximity. "Is that, like, a ploy to subtly tell one-night-stands to get the fuck out?"  _Like Barney Stinson_ , she almost adds, but she doesn't want to give him any more ideas.

"Jade, please, I have no use for 'ploys' or 'subtlety.'" He shrugs. "My apartment is a piece of art; I go where the space futurism takes me."

She snorts and spares him a brief glance — and then a double take when his face betrays no hint of the humor that should have been there. "Wait," she stammers out, "are you telling me your  _honest-to-goodness_  place of residence looks like something out of  _Star Trek_?" Not that she's ever seen it, but Hunter's given enough lectures on the series' lasting innovative legacy for something to stick.

"You know I don't keep up with Hollywood franchises," Ike chides, even though he'd been there for most of those same lectures. "But if you mean sleek surfaces, an excess of the color white, and enough geometry to make Pythagoras' corpse have a wet dream in the grave — well, then, yes, I suppose so."

How much has he had to drink? It hadn't looked like much more than her two glasses in the restaurant, but maybe he still keeps a flask on him like he used to.

Her eyes narrow as she once-overs him yet again, more carefully now, looking for signs of alien abduction. (Pun… intended?) It's difficult to see most of his clothes, kneeling as close as he is, but for once she refuses to be distracted by the sight of his face, just inches away. He looks about the same as she'd expected him to, on the rare occasions she'd bothered to think about him at all — but maybe she hasn't been paying enough attention.

She studies him: gauging the cut of his shirt, sifting through all the snide comments she'd ever bothered to remember, speeding past all the memories they'd made in a fancy room that had actually been a prison cell.

"Bullshit," she decides. "I saw pictures of where you used to live on Facebook — your taste is as old money as it gets."

He raises a finger. "Ah, no, see, that would be my  _mother's_ taste," he corrects with a fair bit of amusement. "Unlike  _some_ people, I didn't inherit mine."

"Okay, first of all, nostalgic fondness and aesthetic approval are very different things—" she says before he can start ragging on Betsy again.

Ike quirks an eyebrow. "I wouldn't know."

And briefly, she sees a neglected boy who had never loved anything enough to want to keep it.

"Regardless," he continues, "I was contractually obligated to live in my childhood home until Abraham's plans for me were fulfilled. If I wanted to keep my inheritance, anyway — thanks, Dad." He rolls his eyes. "Couldn't even trash the place or knock some walls out — or take down that  _godawful_ Monet my mother used to cherish. Something about newborn psychic attachment, or some other Academy bullshit." He waves a dismissive hand. "Anyway, it's really only in the last few years that I've been able to 'spread my stylistic wings', if you'll pardon my French."

Briefly, she feels something dangerously close to respect for the man that boy has grown into. "Nope, I don't buy it," she says, before her heart has a chance to run too far away. "Nobody changes that much in just a few years."

"I mean, really, Jade," he says with a chuckle. "Is it honestly so difficult to believe that I would try to embrace the future instead of clinging to the suffocating past? What with that whole _'_ for a better—' Well, you know."

She does — and it's had the opposite effect on her. Bad enough that she's never had to strain her imagination too hard to know what a worse future might look like, but now she can't even trust the better ones because of the atrocities that have been done in their name? Any way you twist it, the future's a trap; the past is the only thing that's safe.

"You know," she muses, not quite sure if she's teasing anymore, "somewhere out there right now, Daramount's ghost is ecstatic to learn that the brainwash worked on someone."

"Hey, not true — everybody I ever met in that place tried to talk me out of being a selfish asshole, and guess what." He flashes a pleased grin. "Tell you what: come over sometime and see for yourself," he offers easily. "I promise there's not a single wooden surface in the entire place. I even have a hologram projector and everything."

And for the second time, she's somehow too preoccupied to wonder if he's trying to ask her out again, though something about his voice certainly feels like it. "Nice try, Ike," she says through a snort. "You think I don't know what a few days and a ton of money can buy? You are exactlythe kind of fucker who would deck out a spare property with fake interior just for a laugh."

"Fine, let's go right now, then," he says without a moment's hesitation. "Surely even I couldn't scramble together anything that elaborate in half an hour."

Shit. "Ike, I— We can't," she says, ducking back into the box and digging through more cleaning supplies. "I still need to find the antiseptic, remember?"

He cranes his head for a moment. "It's right there," he says easily and points to the floor somewhere on her other side.

In the same motion, he leans past her to reach for it, and like lightning, the mood shifts. Her shoulder tingles with the heat from his cheek. One of his propped hands grazes the side of her bare thigh; the skin there zooms into her focus and blooms with goosebumps. She can smell the cologne wafting off his shirt — if she leaned in just an inch, her lips would press against his chest.

He is  _so close_. And she can remember this  _so well_.

She breathes, frozen, for the two seconds it takes him to get what he's looking for. Every taut nerve in her body aches.

Then he's sitting back again, not a hair out place — and it's like nothing's happened, like he hadn't just made her lungs try to climb out her throat. "Here," he says softly, pressing the small bottle into her hand; and he doesn't even have the decency to be hoarse, or unsteady, or any of the other things that would come out of her mouth at this moment, were she able to speak at all.

And right then — like that wasn't enough — the bright light illuminating them flickers out, as if on cue.

And it's not like anything else has changed. They're still sitting exactly as many inches apart, having exactly the same conversation — bound by exactly the same mysterious hangups. Yet looking at him now, with only the bare outlines of his features visible in the dim glow emanating from the kitchen doorway, the buzzing on her skin takes on an entirely new quality. So much less resistable.

It would be so simple. He'd only have to lean his face a few inches closer and lay a hand on her thigh where it'd already been before, and they could lose themselves in the illicit desires that had never seemed quite so misguided once the lights were off. A better opportunity couldn't have come if he'd asked for it specifically.

But he only makes a noncommittal hum and looks up at the darkness, the same way he'd look over to the sound of a distant airplane flying overhead. "I suppose the previous tenants forgot to change a lightbulb," is all he says with a pensive expression.

And so without a word, she reaches into another box, gets out the gauze she'd seen earlier, takes the bottle he'd found — and gets to work.

* * *

 

This isn't the first time she's tended a wound of Ike's. They'd never made it a habit, and she always thought it'd be tempting fate to gain more than a rudimentary understanding of first aid, but she's no stranger to his exposed skin or the little noises he makes when anything stings a little too much. (For someone with such an uncanny ability to incite violence in others, he really got the shit end of pain thresholds.)

Granted, she's used to the bruises being a little closer to vital organs, and for his clothes to be stained with a lot more blood— oh, but there's still quite a bit of red on his pantsleg. Maybe not all of the looks they'd gotten from passersby on the way had been about her erratic behavior.

She works methodically on cleaning the cut in the half-light, trying not to feel the warmth of his hand in hers, or to notice the softness of it — the almost eerie silkiness that comes from never having to work a day in your life to earn the best creams that money can buy — the kind of perfection that she'd never seen up close growing up, had never even dreamed would existoutside of old movies and smoothed-out advertisements.

She works, trying not to remember what it had felt like to have that hand glide along her skin: up and down, inside… She presses down on the gauze with extra force, deriving at least some grim satisfaction from his sharp breath.

And it's not that she's a nymphomaniac, or even that she's mad at him, necessarily. Before this, she'd been perfectly capable of having civilized conversations with old flames without the looming threat of spontaneous combustion. It's just that back in the day, the one thing — the  _only_ thing — you could always depend on Ike for was his insatiable desire for carnal relations. So much so that she'd always considered it a core trait of his, not something he was likely to ever evolve past.

Except that the room is still barely lit, and his hand is in hers, and each of her breaths feels like she's waging war with the air. Everything inside her yearns to pull him close — but he doesn't do a thing about it. And for the first time she has to start wondering if they've grown apart instead of just 'up'.

And the best part is, she can't even be mad at him for all this frustration, because, hey, congrats on personal growth. She hadn't known that that was something he was working on, but she's still reasonable enough to count her petty disappointment as miniscule against…  _whatever_ it is that he's trying to achieve. (An experiment in celibacy? Unlikely, but who the hell knows at this point.)

Then again, if she had known that sex was off the table, not just tonight but potentially forever, she might not have prolonged the evening quite so readily—

No, that's a lie. She would've acted exactly the same. And that's maybe the scariest part.

Swallowing a sigh, she finishes with the cleaning and goes to bandage the cut up. As she works on the final knot, the kitchen light behind him gives a little flicker too. Without thinking about it, she glances up at the distraction, even as the light returns — but then her eyes land on his face instead, and instantly her breath catches.

In the second before he can do anything about it, she sees his expression free of any pretenses and masks. Just briefly, unguarded, it is a mirror of her every thought and desire, everything she's tried so hard not to show, all laid out there for her to see. In the moment that her gaze connects with his, he's staring at her with hunger — pupils blown, lips parted, something close to _desperation_ in the creases of his face.

Her skin gives a sharp buzz. How long has he been looking at her like that?

Wait, no, that's the wrong question.

How long has she been sitting there fumingwhile he's been looking at her like  _that_?

He turns away only a fraction of a moment after she catches him. That same light nonchalance is back in his features with impressive speed, and then it's the face he's been wearing all night — the one that says  _sure, we used to fuck, but tonight we're just having some fun_. The one that's stopped her every time her natural instincts would've told her to keep going. The one she'd mistaken for being genuine.

She hadn't thought that he was simply not attracted to her anymore, of course not. Even in the darkest depths of her frustration, that option had never even crossed her mind — in fact, she'd doubt it's even possible, for reasons best to forget. But it's like breathing, or maybe like living with a chronic illness — when it's always there in the background, eventually you only notice it when you're paying attention.

She thought he'd just learned not to pay attention.

But if that's not the case… If this distance is as maddening to him as it is to her… Then that doesn't— She has to suppress a snort. What was that one tale the Academy had tried to feed them, the only one that made a bit of sense? Something about living captive inside prisons of one's own making… He seems like he needs a refresher on that one.

Because what else is this? What else do you call two adults who 1) want each other, 2)  _know_ that they want each other, 3) don't have moral or external reasons to resist that fact, and 4) don't even have to worry about insecurities or compatibility, because they've already _gone_ through all that? By her math, that's about 98% of classic movie misunderstandings already accounted for.

She watches in disbelief as he keeps surveying the room with the same bemusedly curious face as before, sometimes pretending to examine something in greater detail but mostly just taking great care not to look at her again.

How stupiddoes he think she is? Now that she's looking, it's impossible not to see the subtle clench of his jaw, the little tension in his wrist. His stomach must be in worse knots than hers, and there's no way he doesn't know that she can see it; and yet, were it up to him, he'd probably go the rest of the night — or month, or year — without any word of it, like nothing's happened at all.

In fact, the one time he half-glances at her, she thinks she sees something like a plea in his eyes.  _Just go with it, Jade_ , he seems to ask.  _Just pretend._

But finally she can't take it anymore.

Carefully, she puts the bandages and the gauze back into a box, and then pushes it away along with two others so that she can scoot closer to him. She settles in with her shoulder against the saran-wrapped couch and her folded knees mingling with his, the muted light from the kitchen casting a strange half-circle around them.

Jade studies him like that for a long moment, the room silent but for the sounds of upbeat chatter outside. He tries his damndest not to look at her, but she keeps her gaze steady on him and so she sees it, every time his eyes flicker back toward her. Eventually she reaches over for his hands and takes them in her own; it's an instinct that's not quite confidence but rather perhaps a certainty of some sort.

She traces the patterns of his veins idly with her finger. Waiting… waiting. Still he doesn't say a word. They'd always been good at not talking.

Well, fuck that.

"Why haven't you kissed me, Ike?" she asks quietly, letting the words settle between them. "I know you want to."

His brilliant eyes dart back to her in the dim lights, piercing and evasive. " _Do_ you, now?" All that wine must have buzzed off, or else she'd overestimated its influence on him. Never did see him drink anything but scotch and champagne in the good old days, after all. "I thought the whole point was that I'm a selfish bastard who needs to stop doing whatever the hell he wants all the time." There's a warning in his tone.

"I thought you said that was never gonna happen," she points out.

"Oh, you never know, Jade," he muses with dark humor. "Two years under Gribbs' thumb, five more executing Abraham's  _tiresome_  posthumous plans — with training like that, I might've 'moved to Poughkeepsie or something.'"

He waits for her to get it, a pleased little smirk on his face — for her to roll her eyes, for her to appreciate the  _care_ he's putting into mocking her. She can almost see the layers upon deflective layers as he drags them to the courtroom. The things she used to think were his self, his essential  _Ike-ness_  — before she'd realized that if she saw him when nobody was watching, there'd be nothing to recognize.

She could smile at his joke and leave this be. She could take his bait and go fishing for another harmless anecdote like she's done all night. She could even take this quiet opportunity and steer them into darker waters full of bared souls and unknowable truths — the ones where they've only sailed a few times, in the cover of black caves and hallucinogenic dreamscapes, safe in the assurance that they will remember so little in the morning that none of it may have ever happened at all.

But she doesn't say anything. She's asked a question, and for once she takes the time to wait for an answer.

"Perhaps my curiosity won out," he says after a moment, with a degree of petulance. "Perhaps I wanted to find out what would happen if we didn't take the obvious route." Now his voice takes a different tone. "What if we  _didn't_ fall into bed at first chance? Would whoever's up there watching lose a bet? Would the universe implode?"

And because she knows that he means it — because she might've said something similar, if the roles were reversed — she almost lets him get away with this truth that screams of its unwholeness. She's done it many times before, after all. She should be a pro at letting him go by now.

But that's not enough, not this time.

" _Why_ , Ike?" she repeats.

Slowly, the smirk fades from his face, and his hand tightens inside hers, and there it is, that feeling she's been expecting all evening. His icy eyes stay on hers for a long moment, holding within them secrets she'll never know — posing questions she doesn't know how to even understand, let alone answer. She knows how this goes. In a minute he'll decide that she hasn't passed whatever test he's conjured up, and he'll turn away and grit his teeth with what he would never admit is self-loathing, just like he always does. And whatever chance they ever had of  _seeing_ each other will be gone, and she'll feel like a sucker for hoping that they ever could. They've been through this, after all.

But he keeps his eyes steady, and bit by bit, they soften instead. She doesn't catch when it happens — she's not even sure that the two of them aren't trapped in that moment for years and years, eternity stretching out before them in this dim room — but at some point she realizes that he's gazing at her with what she would describe as unmistakable affection, were it coming from anyone else. With unwavering care, he studies her face, her hair, their intertwined hands, with a little smile on his face, and then, finally…

"I wanted to see if we could manage being friends this time," Ike says quietly. He says it without looking at her, without any trace of mockery, without a lot of things she would have expected.

He says it as though this room were a cathedral and he were confessing to his sins.

And that's all it takes for something inside her to unravel, for all those things she's kept locked away for a decade to barrel through the walls of her heart, as fresh and poignant as they had been the day she'd sworn never to touch them again. Because of course there's a  _reason_ why they haven't seen each other in five years, not even for so much as a coffee or a phone call or a fucking Facebook message.

He is unfinished.  _They_ are unfinished.

* * *

 

She's dated other men, of course she has. She's loved some of them, she thinks sometimes. She's hated her fair share, too. She's danced drunk under the stars, talked deep into the night with lifelong friends — had her heart filled to bursting with the joy of belonging. And nothing has ever,  _ever_ felt quite as easy as taking Ike's hand in the shadow of an ancient fire, that first day when they were ever in the same moment together at the same time.

Hunter had said once that Ike was someone you had to learn to exist around. That was the night she'd started to wonder if there was something wrong with her, because to her it sounded like saying you had to learn how to pump blood through your veins. How could anyone do something so impossible, so entirely out of their control?

Or rather… why would she still be alive if she hadn't already known  _how_ the moment she'd sprung into existence?

It's not just that the physical had been uncomplicated with him. It's not just that their bodies always knew what to do with each other, whether she was trying to kiss him or, just as frequently, aiming to punch him. It's not just that standing next to him would make her feel more present in her own self in those years when she could never be sure, at any given moment, if what she was seeing was reality or, well, something else.

It'd be simpler if that's all it was, if she could just write it off as a fluke of animal attraction, like everybody else seemed to.

But being around him had been  _effortless_.

She'd felt it that afternoon in the cave, the temporary release of a weight she had not known was there — all her anxiety and shyness and uncertainty evaporating into the ether like it had never been there. It had smothered her all the more later, once she was aware of how heavy the shackles truly were, but not with him. With him, she could say whatever, do whatever, be whatever she'd held back around everyone else since before she could remember — she hadn't even needed to be brave, because she was no longer afraid to be herself in the first place.

Growing up, she'd always assumed that once she'd found someone like that, someone with whom there were never any pretenses, then that was it — they would be hers forever. But that's the thing: talking to him had been the easiest thing in the world, yet making herself understood was hell. Understanding him had been an impossibility.

'Talking' had never meant 'saying'— didn't mean 'trust', didn't mean 'camaraderie'. Didn't mean 'love', not even the most fucked up version of it.

Hell, it didn't even mean 'like', most of the time.

And because he made being herself so easy, he'd also made it easy to be angry. Heaven knows he'd excelled at drawing that rage out of her himself — reveled in it, she'd think sometimes. But he'd been even better at nurturing her lust, and it was just  _so easy_  to let their bodies do all the work. And so, night after night, over and  _over_ , they'd throw out a spark at each other and light a match, and see which parts of themselves caught fire. And in the morning she'd hate herself, and hate him a little more, but it'd be an empty hate because she hadn't cared enough to commit to even that.

He'd worked on her like cheap alcohol, taking away all her inhibitions with none of the high and all of the hangover.

And then she'd see him, and he'd ignite her, and they'd do it all over again — and they  _could've_ kept at it forever, because it's not like it was terrible. Despite everything, despite the fact that 'easy' was rarely ever a synonym for 'good', had it ever made her miserable the way it ought to have? No — instead it'd been comforting, and thrillingly heightened, and even a lot of fun sometimes.

In fact, she would've considered it one of her most successful dalliances, had it been with anyone else — if it didn't reekof a promise unfulfilled every time she thought of it.

Because here's the other thing: what if it didn't have to be that way?

There had been  _something_ about him, ever since they'd first met, a magnetic sort of pull underneath all his abrasiveness. She'd written the feeling off as one of her more destructive impulses, or maybe as a side effect of the green stuff that Nine had so loved to poison them all with, but she'd wondered… Even as they'd begun sneaking around, she'd wondered…

And then she'd seen it in her dreams, all the ways that their past lives had been intertwined — all the things that their two souls had shared, and felt, in the millennia gone by. That pull was no trick of her imagination, no wishful thinking born out of misplaced romanticism. It was something material, a mystical bond forged through endless centuries of bloodshed and sacrifice, more ancient perhaps than the world itself. More powerful, certainly.

She could still almost taste it if she closed her eyes. Somewhere out there was a version of them that could be something  _more_ than this complicated, skittish dance they were so caught up in. A version that they had no access to, would never experience for themselves, because something inside both of them was broken this time around.

But the thought of what  _could_ be if they ever got over the pride and the selfishness — if they took advantage of how easyit all was by dabbling in vulnerability every once in a while, if they found a way to actually let themselves  _like_ each other…

The potential of it all hurtsometimes. Enough that eventually she'd had to leave him behind, in pursuit of relationships that would ride the elevator all the way to the top, even if the skyscraper was half the size — even if you could fit two or three of those new buildings in  _just_ the space that she and Ike had never found fit to explore.

At the end of the day, Ike has always been 'the one' — not in the way that most people mean it, but in the way where she'll never stop wondering what might have been, if neither of them were themselves. He's the one that could'vebeen, the one that  _wasn't_ , the one she could never quite convince herself to be done with. The one she'll forever keep in her back pocket, knowing that no matter where life takes her, they could just pick up right where they left off, and it could be— something. Not the things she wants for herself, but something nonetheless.

She'll always wonder. So will he. And so they'll never say never — but they'll never say the other thing, either. Always stuck, somewhere in the middle, trying not to say anything at all. Even after they'd parted ways the last time (and the time before that, and the one before that) — even when the assumption had been  _there_ , neither of them had had the tenacity to be definitive about it.

They are unfinished— and until tonight, she'd been certain that they could never become anything else. But… He hadn't kissed her. Because he'd wanted to know if they had it in them to be friends. To like each other.

So...

"The two don't have to be mutually exclusive," she says at last, barely a whisper, because things feel different now. The air's been buzzing with potential all night, but for once it doesn't feel like torture. She can't tell if it's the years gone by or the time spent apart, but for the first time since he'd pulled a gun on her, she doesn't know what to expect from him. From…  _this_.

He finally looks back up to her, his expression complicated. "So I keep hearing," he says slowly, "but you know I've never been a believer."

She thinks about the loveless marriage of his parents, about the mistresses of the businessmen who were his only role models, about the countless trysts with girls he'd never bothered to talk to again. No, it's not surprising that he would see these choices — lovers or friends — as incompatible. And yet, of the two, he'd picked the one she never would have expected him to.

"Aren't you?" Jade asks, pulse thudding in her ears, because she can see the way he looks at her. She can hear the way they've been talking. She can feel her heart doing this funny little jolt whenever his fingers brush hers — and if nothing else, they've always been on the same page. Even when the books didn't match.

"And what if I were?" he asks after a moment, voice unsteady. Something like regret seeps into the shadows of his eyes. "Would it really change anything?" She hears what he doesn't say — that even if he believed it was possible at all, there would still be no reason to believe it would be possible for  _them_.

But she considers his words carefully, watching the possibilities stretch out in every direction like a spiderweb. The night seems aglow with these flickers of potential as they trickle into various futures, and no, not all of them are pleasant. Maybe he's right. There are too many ways they could fuck everything up. Maybe they've disappointed each other enough. They could file this new rapport as an interesting experiment and leave it at that. Maybe that's the responsible, adult thing to do, now that they know better.

In the end, though, it really only boils down to one thing.

"Ike," she starts, hesitating. "Do you honestly think we could be friends without all…  _this_?" She gestures between them — to their still-intertwined hands in her lap; to the goosebumps on her thigh where he'd touched her earlier; to the vein in his neck that drums against his skin with about the same force as her own thundering heart.

He stiffens for a long moment and takes a few sharp breaths like he's about to argue, but for every opened mouth there is a silence to follow. Finally, with a small, bitter chuckle, he starts nodding slowly — not in affirmation but in surrender.

"So much for my curiosity," he says with a grimace. "That'll teach me to try to be a scientist."

And from everything he's said tonight, she can guess what that means. Nothing really changes, in the end. They'll part ways, just two people who went to high school once, and that'll be the end of it. But there's something in his voice, something about the way he brings his hands up to rest his chin on an elbow, as though he's forgotten that her hand will come along; something about the way his mouth rests against her knuckles without making a gesture out of it…

"So where does that leave us?" she asks.

It's a question she never would have asked before, a question that would've possessed too much power to speak aloud, let alone to willingly give away. She feels oddly exposed asking it still, but perhaps that's because she already knows her own answer — maybe she'd known it all along. Maybe he's the only undecided one.

She can't tell what that says about them — is she being optimistic or reckless? Is he just being cautious or actually afraid?

Not that she's ever known him to be much of either. In fact, she's never known anyone more thoroughly convinced of their own invincibility — nor anyone more frequently urged to reevaluate that conviction. Still, somehow through every reckless decision he's ever made and every megalomaniac he's ever pissed off, he's made it through unscathed — with rarely even a broken bone, and never a broken spirit — so really, who's to say he hadn't had the right of it all along?

No, as measured as his eyes seem when he fixes them back on her without a word, there's something else lurking behind that composure — something raw, something dangerous.

"Where does that leave us, do you think?" she repeats, just barely above a whisper.

But he just keeps those guarded eyes on her as the silence stretches out between them in the strange shadows created by the half-light behind him. Once, his mouth opens, but whatever he was about to say turns into air before it can reach her ears. Slowly, like before, something in his face starts to shift again — but this time it takes her much longer to pinpoint, because this feeling is somehow even less familiar than the one before.

In her memories, there was always something  _off_  about the way he moved. He didn't fidget; he didn't stutter. You'd never see him run back to fetch something he'd forgotten or squirm in his chair because he was uncomfortable. He'd had  _so much_  control. No gesture had ever been extraneous; no uttered word had ever been anything less than carefully selected for its purpose — even when that purpose was a masochistic compulsion to repel.

He'd been a statue impersonated, a poker face personified; his features always calculated even when they'd pretended to emote. Pardon moments of extreme frustration, he'd had no use for any expression of himself that wasn't designed to manipulate the world around him into one of his choosing — as though he really were the god he'd almost become.

Sometimes she'd almost envied how whole and nearly graceful it all looked, how much every part of him seemed to know its exact place in the bigger picture in a way her own body couldn't even dream of. Mostly, though, he'd given her the impression that he was an actor playing himself somehow, like he'd never quite existed for the sake of existence itself.

There was no 'real' him, or at least not one that anyone had ever seen — but then she'd never thought that that was much of a difference anyway.

Yet she stares back at him now, and as she waits with a tense chest, into the corners of his mouth creeps an uncertainty — and into his eyes, an intensity. For the first time that she can remember, she can see him thinking — can see it not because he wants to put someone on edge with his intellect or attempt to convey a thoughtfulness that may or may not exist, but just because. He's thinking — and that by definition means he doesn't have a perfect plan of action yet — and somehow he's letting her in on the process anyway.

He may as well have laid himself on an operating table for her to cut open.

She watches those gears in his mind spin, spin,  _spin_ — and though she knows she's being evaluated again, the feeling has the opposite effect on her now. His gaze makes the silence seem deafening. The air feels like cotton candy on her tongue. Her heart thuds in rhythm with the pulsating ambulance lights gliding over the ceiling.

She doesn't know when they'd started leaning towards each other, but she finds herself barely a foot from his face now. And though nothing has changed, not really, she begins to get the feeling that he's not going anywhere tonight.

"I think…" he starts at last, and again she has to adjust to the idea of him taking time to compose his thoughts. "I think I'm curious about a lot of things." There's a hoarseness in his voice that echoes in her ears like the aftermath of a symphony.

"That's not an answer," she says, desperately wishing that it were.

"All right." His gaze drifts to her lips and lingers there for an achingly long moment. "I think this is a treacherous path we're traveling, Ellsworth," he amends. There's a gravity about the words, almost as if he were genuinely torn — but his fingers hover on her wrist, refusing to pull away.

When he swallows, her eyes drift to the dip of his Adam's apple and stay there, watching the quickening shadows of his pulse.

Treacherous. She couldn't agree more.

"Still not an answer," she whispers. There's a freckle on his neck that she doesn't remember being there before.

He shakes his head just a tiny bit, just enough to make her feel like the words he's looking for haven't been invented yet.

"Jade, I think—" He leans in as though hypnotized, gaze still on her lips.

Every cell inside her starts screaming with anticipation. "Yes?"

"I think that if following it is gonna get me killed either way… Then—" A shaky exhale. "I think I'd rather be brought back by satisfaction than regret." His eyes flicker back up to hers, quick and dark and unsteady, and in them are all the answers she needs.

She's only a breath away from him now. "You're not a cat, Ike," she whispers, barely listening to herself.  _He's gonna do it, he's gonna do it, he's gonna do it._

He gives a little smile. "I'm a selfish bastard who's died a couple times, aren't I?"

And then his mouth is on hers.

And it is so…

 _Easy_.

* * *

 

She doesn't have to tell her lips what to do. She doesn't have to think about what she looks like, or whether she should've chewed some gum after their dinner, or if she can keep her spine in that position for another ten minutes. There is only this moment, here and now, with his face against hers and his fingers on her upper arms.

He is so gentle. She hadn't known he could be that gentle.

She keeps waiting for the moment to shift, for the illusion to fall away and unmask this quiet kiss as an impostor. At the very least it must be a mere prelude to the oncoming fire. The match has been lit — the explosion will follow.

But for as long as the strange intermission lasts, she wants to savor its unfamiliarity. In this dusk and quiet, her every sense is swallowed but for the feeling of touch where his skin meets hers. She feels him on her lips, on her shoulder. Only those two spots, but it's almost like physics somehow — the smaller the surface area, the greater the intensity of any given force. She's been wrapped around him so often before, but somehow she can't recall ever being quite as aware of his touch then.

They're not even touching, is the thing. She can barely even feel the heat coming off him; that's how far away the rest of him is.

They may have been there for hours with how thoroughly she loses herself in him, in this side she's never gotten to see before. He kisses her like he doesn't have anywhere else to be, like everything he's ever wanted in the world is wrapped up in her lips at this very moment, or perhaps in the moment two seconds ago. Not in the next kiss, not buried somewhere deeper on her tongue, but right here — like he already has it, like he's at peace.

No — it had always been easy, but in all the nights they'd spent familiarizing themselves with every nook and cranny, it had never been like this.

Any other night she would have left it there; she would've gotten herself drunk on the mere taste of his softened lips for as long as her body would let her — half lost in the delight of it, half afraid that she would never get the chance again. But tonight he's sparked her desire too many times to ignore, and tonight she hasn't had anybody's hands on her for eight months — so tonight she twists her hand in his collar and the other in his hair, and she pulls him closer… because while he may be at peace, she  _is_ looking for something else.

And once again, she has to revise her idea of him to allow for patience, because he comes along with no hesitation whatsoever. There is no adjustment period where she'd have to take her foot off the gas to let him switch gears. Almost as soon as she's made the slightest move, his fingers are on her cheek — along her neck, in her hair — like he's been waiting for it, as though it were his idea all along.

What was it he'd said? Never gonna grow out of doing whatever the hell he wants the second he's thought of it… What a liar.

And what a fool she is, for believing him.

She kisses him all the harder for it now — for the deception or the kindness, she can decide later. Now that the floodgates are opened, she can't fathom why they'd ever built the dam in the first place. His lips are just the same as she remembers: fraught with urgency, tinged with greed. They may as well have been her own, so precisely do they anticipate her every whim.

With a sense of victory, she pulls him closer still — and he pulls on her, and she ends up in his lap, straddling him against the back of her couch. Her foot taps against a box, and her knees scrape against a layer of dust, and it's still far from the messiest place they've ever hooked up. There was that broom closet, the abandoned temple ruins, the middle of a displaced forest… Not even the apocalypse itself could stop them once they got started, it seemed.

And,  _oh_ , it feels like it's starting.

She kisses his jaw, his neck, his ear — allows his one-track mind to remember how to do anything with his hands besides pull her face closer. Now they're on her waist, down her hips, under her blouse… And his lips on her shoulder, tracing the shape of her collarbone. It feels like they're clumsy teenagers again, struck by merciless desires that they don't understand or know what to do with — left to scramble in a mess of limbs and clothing just to get a little closer, touch a little harder.

Jade's always loved the satisfaction of tinkering with his prim vests. He usually wears too many layers for it to make any real dent in her quest to undress him, but that's almost the point. It makes her feel like a character in a Victorian novel, like she's capable of scandalizing the whole town just by daring to undo a few buttons on someone who will stay fully dressed regardless. It's something like a gesture of power, the disposing of this most innocent of articles — because if she can succeed with that, then it's almost as though they were both already naked.

She finishes with the last button and grins, watching the vest slide down his shoulders like silk.

He doesn't even take his hands off her for long enough to discard of the garment. Teeth on her earlobe, he only frees one palm from gripping her bare back to shake the material off, and lets it hang from his other wrist as his fingers return to her waist. She grips a fistful of his hair and bites into his shoulder, squeezes her hips a little harder against him.

Her skin is sizzling. The air becomes thicker and thicker. At some point, he pulls her closer — so close that she can feel his every heartbeat, his every maddening twitch. Soon, the friction between them becomes unbearable.

"My bedroom's over there," she gasps out at last, managing only a nod in a vague direction. "It's a mess, and I think I spilled some dirt in there earlier, but—"

"Does it have a bed?" he counters against her neck like it's an ironclad argument.

"I, uh…" She genuinely has to think about it. "It has a mattress," she offers.

She can feel his lips curve against her skin. "Then it's perfect."

And just like that, he pushes himself off the floor and takes her up with him. She barely swallows a startled yelp, but it wouldn't have mattered — suddenly his mouth is on hers, and it stays there without faltering as he straightens himself upright with astonishing ease. She locks her legs around his hips and grabs on hard, praying that she's left some soft surfaces in the path to her room. The skinny boy she used to know would've snapped like a twig just thinking about picking her up.

The man before her, however, somehow barely even struggles with his balance as he carries the both of them through the living room.

Gripped by an exhilarating suspicion, she yanks his shirt out of his pants and sneaks her hands under it, and—  _oh, boy_. He hadn't looked very different with his clothes on, with his same gray suits and his same lanky build, but as her fingers trace the skin of his abdomen, there's a very definite, unfamiliar hardness there. She has never known Ike to spend any time in the gym — or, really, anywhere that might mess up his manicure — but it seems that even the most self-evident of assumptions are up for grabs tonight. It makes her want to rip that shirt right off him and see what else has changed.

And hell, what's one more bad decision? She glides her hands back up to his chest, grabs two fistfuls of material, and  _pulls_.

She's not entirely sure what she'd expected would happen. Buttons flying everywhere? The fabric tearing at the seams and making that really satisfying sound she always hears in the movies?

Certainly anything other than making Ike snort against her mouth when her grand sexy gesture does absolutely nothing.

Ever stubborn, she pulls again — this time hoping that maybe the buttons will slide neatly out of their holes, because honestly the environmentalist in her detests the idea of unnecessary waste — but maybe those designer tags are worth something after all, because the material doesn't budge even a little. All her life, she's been lied to.

He chuckles again as she gives a few more feeble tugs in between distracted kisses, but her heart's not really in it anymore. Finally, she settles for undoing this damn shirt the old-fashioned way, one button at a time — but by then he's snickering so hard that it actually makes him stumble and he has to ram them into a wall to remain upright.

The crash jolts her system and briefly disorients her, but only in the way where it makes her feel even more alive — she can't exactly say she minds being sandwiched between his weight and a hard surface. Even when he keeps laughing at her, fully out loud now, it only makes her more intimately aware of his body pushing against hers.

"Shut up," she manages, but she's laughing too.

He shakes his head, barely swallowing the humor. "Were you even  _trying_?"

"Hey, we didn't all spend the last five years in a gym, okay?" she says, demonstratively undoing the last of his shirt and taking a long look underneath. Holy shit. "I mean, seriously, when the fuck did  _that_  happen?" She gestures at his chiseled body like it was a personal affront.

"About two years ago," he says, clearly pleased with himself. "See, my doctor told me — and trust me, you'll be  _shocked_ by this — but it turns out that a steady diet of drugs and alcohol does not in fact a healthy person make."

She narrows her eyes at him. "Right, so naturally your only recourse was to get  _ripped_."

Ike flashes a grin. "Well, I'm not sure if you know this about me, Jade, but, uh—" He adjusts his hold on her and presses himself somehow even closer into her, smirking all the way. "I don't 'do' things halfway,'" he says with mischievous significance.

And he kisses her — kisses her into the wall, kisses her while his hands remove her blouse, kisses her until her limbs feel like they're about to turn into jelly, until she can barely hang onto his hips, so much does she want him. Bit by bit, her legs slide down the fabric of his trousers, and eventually she finds herself hanging onto him by nothing but her arms locked tightly around his neck. When she starts slipping, Ike's hands abandon their dutiful posts on her waist and wrap her in an iron hug, holding their bodies tightly together with little but the sheer force of friction.

He carries her through the doorway like that, her legs dangling off the floor and their mouths fused together. Somehow they make it to her unassembled bed and tumble down in a messy tangle. He is everywhere; he is everything. They roll around like feral cats on the wrinkled sheets she hadn't bothered to make that morning; at some point she stops being able to tell which limb belongs to whom, but there's a certain sense that it doesn't really matter because they were always one and the same to begin with.

Jade only unwraps her legs from around him when he helps her wiggle out of her shorts — and then his lips are on her navel — and on her hip bone — and then lower, lower…

She's always liked his mouth; it's quick and precise, and unfailingly intentional. Because he spends so much of his life talking, and because so much of him is contained in the words he chooses, she almost thinks of the two as synonymous. For better or worse, his mouth is the crux of what it means to be around him; it's the cause of every burst of laughter, every angry tear, every frustrated groan... Every sigh of pleasure.

Her body goes pliant under him. She can do little else but clutch him close, close… closer.

It doesn't take long for her toes to curl, for there to be nowhere else for the tension to go but out. When she feels human enough to prop herself up on her elbows again, Ike leans back on his knees and dusts off his hands — with his self-satisfied face and his half-open shirt and his hair all messed up from her fingers raking through it, and— god, she would do anything he asked just for the chance to kiss him again. Nuke the whole world, if need be.

So she springs back up at him and knocks them both off-balance and kisses him until her lips are sore and her fingers have fumbled his belt undone. Together they wrangle off his remaining clothes and twist themselves even closer than before. She maybe has to take back what she'd thought about touch before — the novelty of 'minimal' is certainly worth exploring, but there's nothing quite like the messy explosion of skin to bare, naked skin.

Her fingers roam over his body as they please, across all the familiarities and all the new additions — muscles, scars, even some tattoos. Her mouth does the same, and so does his, and soon she can't wait anymore; she has to have him. With a few more kisses, she laces their fingers and hooks her leg around him and—

"Shit, I have no idea which box the condoms are in." Dread washes over her, sobering her up like an icy shower. " _Shit_ , I don't even know if I haveany."

"Oh." Ike unsticks his lips from hers. "Hang on." He shuffles to the edge of the mattress, almost losing his balance with their legs entwined, and fumbles for his discarded pants. It takes a moment for her to understand what he's doing in the dim lights, but then a low chuckle escapes.

"You seriously carry condoms in your wallet?" she asks, unable to help herself.

He pauses rummaging through it to give her a withering glare, along with an easy smile. "I'm sorry, do  _you_ wanna put this exact situation on hold for an hour while I try to find a drug store that's still open and obtain them the 'respectable' way?"

They were always good at calling each other's bluffs.

"No," Jade says, her turn now to sport a busted grin. "Not really."

"Then, with all due respect, Ellsworth"— he fishes out the little square and climbs back on top of her with another kiss —" _shut the fuck up_."

He says it softly into her ear, as though it were a sweet nothing — and to her, it almost sounds like one.

* * *

 

Some time later, she untangles herself from him and snuggles into the sheets with a satisfied hum, not quite able to decide if she's feeling electrified or absolutely exhausted. Her breath comes in bursts; her skin tingles; her brain  _sings_. It seems very silly now to think that the evening could've ended any other way but this.

"Just like riding a bike," she gasps out with more than a little relief.

In fact, it's better than that. It's more like having learned to ride a bike and then being able to drive a motorcycle without even trying, and then also discovering that the motorcycle can fly, and that actually you can fly without it, too. Not only have they not lost anything that ever made this special, but it seems that they have also gained so much more with time and experience. She doesn't even know how much — and, honestly, part of her doesn't want to find out, because how would she ever settle for anything less when they inevitably part ways again?

She turns to grin at him, expecting to find the same astonishment on his face that must be on hers, but he only he cocks his head to look at her with puzzlement — all sweaty and spent and impossibly sexy. "The hell kinda bikes have  _you_ been riding?" he asks through a laugh.

Her mind blanks — then runs through every meaning of 'ride' and 'bike' (and also 'just', for good measure) to figure out how he could've construed it any other way than she'd meant it — and then she has to hold back a familiar groan.

"I'm not a porn star, Ike, Jesus," she says.

"No?" He grins. "'Cause I was about to say, we could probably arrange something of the sort, if you were so inclined."

She glowers at him. "I am  _not_  biking around New York with a dildo up my ass, Ike," she says with a snort. "Whatever little fantasies you have, I suggest you abandon them now."

"Hey, it doesn't have to be New York," he says, amenable. "We can 'go to Poughkeepsie or something.'"

With that same familiar groan, she grabs her pillow and swings it straight into his face.

He lets it lay there for a moment, like a man doing penance. She almost starts hoping he's accepted the error of his ways, but of course the moment he drags it off, he just gives her a long unimpressed look — and then starts tickling her every surface.

"All I'm saying is," he manages through a laugh as she tries to wriggle out of his reach, "I like to plan ahead." He gets one last squeal out of her and then sits back on his knees, satisfied. "If we keep doing this, at some point we're gonna start needing some props or locations or  _something_. I mean, tonight was…" He shakes his head, stunned — and it's almost reverent, the way his eyes trail up her side, over her ribs, down her chest. That gaze alone would've ignited the skin it touched, but his hand follows, and so her pulse starts to race once more.

"Was what?" she prompts breathlessly, just to hear him say it.

He shakes his head again, this time wowed by her shamelessness instead of her body. "There  _is_ something to be said about the human condition," he starts pensively, "in that we are all always striving for some yet unreached heights of existence"— a drawn out scholarly gesture, just to taunt her —"never content to think of our glory days as anything other than still waiting up ahead—"

But then even his famous composure breaks, and the awe returns.

"That said, I, uh… I don't know how we top that," he says.

And like a reflex, she makes a satisfied noise somewhere between a giggle and a purr. "Agh, I knooow — that last time I think I saw  _God,"_ she says before she can think better of it, stretching like a feline in a box of catnip just to feel the fluidity of her limbs. But then, because she knows him far too well: "Don't let that get to your head," she warns, cracking one eye open.

"Oh, I most  _certainly_ will," he announces with a grin and pulls her closer yet again.

He kisses her with joy, kisses her until they're both gasping for air again, kisses her so that by the time he's finished, they're hopelessly tangled in her sheets and cursing their bodies for still having mundane needs like rest and recuperation. She pushes herself away with some regret.

"Listen," he says when they've mostly gotten off each other. "I'd do the polite thing and skedaddle now, but I am simply much too tired for such shenanigans"— he yawns, as if on cue —"so I hope you'll forgive me for staying the night."

Hazy as her brain is, it takes her a second to dig coherent meaning out from all those convoluted negatives — and then another to decide how to best jibe him about his backward standards of politeness — and then a third to roll over, ready to tease the pants off of him, figuratively speaking. But of course she never gets the chance, because in true men's fashion, those mere three seconds later her eyes land not upon a smirky sex god but a curiously sound sleeper.

And yet she can't find it in her to fault him for it, not with his sunken eyes, not with all his features softened like this. It grants him a peculiar kind of innocence that takes her aback every time she sees it and always makes her want to revise her perception of him — even though she knows it's a lie, even though she could hardly imagine a more prolific sinner.

She spends a while there, just looking at him — remembering everything that's happened tonight, every turn they'd taken that she hadn't foreseen when she got up this morning. She'd never thought of herself as particularly spontaneous, but man, what a difference a few hours can make.

It all just feels surreal somehow. Even though he's lying right there next to her arm, she can't help an urge to look at the photos they'd taken earlier, just to make sure that it all really happened. She reaches over for the phone in his abandoned slacks, careful not to jostle him, and unlocks it like he had in the restaurant — it had surprised her how easily he'd trusted her with it, but maybe she'd forgotten that he harbors no secrets she doesn't already know.

The gallery floods her with a slew of silly snaps. There must have been upwards of fifty of them, captured during their walk in varying stages of messy. Many are out of focus, others show only half of someone's face, and others still have managed to reflect the light in such a way that turns them red, or purple, or half-obscured by a finger. Yet row after row, the high spirits jump off the screen no matter how terrible the photo.

She slowly scrolls through his camera roll, looking for one that looks somewhat decent, and— there. An electrified shock runs through her the instant she sees it. It's the kind of picture she'd expect to find in a glossy magazine, the kind of picture that would make her green with envy if she saw it on some friend's feed. The kind of picture that makes her feel like she's violating someone's privacy just by looking at it, even though the only privacy up for question is her own.

On the screen, she and Ike are caught exchanging a look. That's all there is to it; there shouldn't be anything special about this photo other than that it actually looks like one, unlike most of the others. It shouldn't make her her heart race and her arms ache upon viewing it. But there's something so intimate about the gaze, almost as if it were a tangible object, almost as though it were woven of knowledge itself made physical.

She'd tried to photograph her school's resident purple ghost once, a long time ago. The photo had come out surprisingly clear — almost supernaturally perfect in its capturing of the real thing, in fact — but it had left her with a distinct impression that certain kinds of magic weren't meant to be preserved this way, that they'd break the brains of anyone who looked at them for too long. The urge to avert her eyes now feels unsettlingly similar.

And maybe that's because she  _is_ an intruder — because this picture doesn't belong to her, doesn't belong to him, doesn't belong to anyone but the people who were in that moment together and never will be again. It's ephemeral, like everything else used to be before humans decided to become gods in a way entirely different from what the Academy was trying to do — and unlike her captors, actually succeeded at it.

She stares at the photo for maybe ten minutes, fingers hovering over the delete button. Finally, with a sigh, she presses it — but she sends a copy to herself first. She doesn't want him to see it, and she doesn't want to look at it herself, but she needs it to exist, somewhere, somehow. If this goes bad — especially if it goes bad — she wants there to be some record of how they had looked at each other, if only once, just to show that it was possible, that it really happened.

That they were here.

* * *

 

She wakes with a start, disoriented by the dim light of dawn where there should have been golden beams. It's rare that she'd wake in the middle of the night, preferring instead to be paralyzed asleep by her nightmares, but, wait, she hadn't been dreaming— Then she hears the sounds of rustling and beeping that had woken her, and her heart lurches. This room has not yet become familiar, and she's never made a habit of waking up in strange places. Her system explodes with adrenaline.

But the following sigh is achingly familiar, even in this darkness — and just as quickly, serenity replaces the dread.

" _Shh, shh, damn you, stupid thing_ ," she hears him whisper now as the beeping slowly quiets. Then, to her: "Sorry. Didn't mean to wake you."

She opens one eye to the figure beside her, barely visible through the mess of hair fallen on her face. He's fiddling with his fancy smartwatch, kneeling on the bed in his boxer briefs and wrinkly unbuttoned shirt. All the product in his already straw-like hair has fixed it in place resembling something of a bird's nest, and his dressy jeans dangle from an ankle, half pulled up one leg. There's a possibility somewhere that she might want to jump him again right then, were she not convinced she'd just gone to bed twenty minutes ago.

"What time is it?" she slurs, wincing as headlights out the window reflect off the ceiling.

He barely glances at the watch he's struggling to fasten around his wrist, intently focused as always. "Uhh, about five-fifteen, I think."

"Oh,  _fuck off_."

With that, she rolls away on her stomach, gathers the blankets around her, and kicks him sharply off the mattress. His muffled snicker reaches her under the wool, but she pretends to ignore him. "I can't help it," he whispers through a grin, which she hates that she can tell just by the sound of his voice — even with her back to him, even all these years later. "I'm trying out this whole 'respectability'thing, and I think people in the office wouldn't be too pleased if I showed up in clothes stained with blood, among… other things."

 _That_ tone she could never forget if she tried. "Gross," she mutters as she feels him climbing back into the bed.

"I was _referring_ to the pizza grease from your sneaky little fingers," Ike whispers softly into her ear and gives it a little kiss.

"Oh."

"...which they left all over my crotch, of course," he continues, unable to resist, and then narrowly avoids her badly aimed swat. As she's done more than a few times tonight, she marvels at how little some things can change in a dozen-odd years.

"I'll see ya around, Ellsworth," he says with one more peck to her cheek, and then, still laughing, saunters out of the room, back toward the kitchen. She burrows deeper into her pillows and tries not to think about the tingling on her skin where his lips had just been.

* * *

 

To his credit, he had meant to leave a note. He hadn't quite figured out what to write it with, or where to leave it, or what it would say — and, to be frank, he's relieved he no longer needs to make these pesky decisions — but he had meant to leave one. This is better, though, he supposes with one last glance back at the sleeping redhead before quietly pushing the door shut behind him. The day ahead had seemed like a long fourteen hours without seeing that smile of hers — or the scowl, whichever came first. Now, with the last memories of both no longer being muddled by sleep, he almost doesn't mind going into work on a Saturday.

It occurs to him that he never asked her what she does for a living now. She would've told him if it was something especially interesting, right? Maybe she's become a corporate sellout, just like him; that'd be fun. He'll have to make sure not to let her live that moral failure down for a few weeks. What will she be doing all day, he wonders as he pulls up his trousers. Probably unpacking. Maybe he could convince her to go get those waffles after work — and with them, hopefully some more comfortable chairs. Or, hmm, he'd seen that that band she used to be obsessed with is in town this weekend; what was the name—?  _Something something… Chokers? Smokers?_ Something way too kinky for a pseudo-Christian band, in any case; he'll have to have his assistant look that up.

Packing paper crinkles under his feet as he treks across the living room in the faint light of a beginning sunrise. He could surprise her with tickets as a gag gift and then watch as she pretends not to enjoy herself the whole night. He could look up some lyrics beforehand and annoy the hell out of her by singing along with the wrong ones. And tomorrow, they could spend the entire day in bed, figuring out exactly how many months' worth of pent-up lust they can squeeze into a few hours, for science. And then—

Hold it, Ike. Get through today first.

Already thinking like an addict, he realizes with snicker—and comes to a halt at the sight of two women in Jade's brightly lit kitchen.

The darker curly one notices him first, slaps the arm of the other one — an icy pixie-cut blonde who immediately flashes him a startled death stare. He staggers back, torn between yelling to alert Jade and just plain taking them on — what threat could two scrawny women pose that he's never dealt with before? — but something about those eyes… His gaze zeroes in on the blonde's twitching mouth, wondering why it looks so familiar, and for a moment, he almost thinks it's curving into a smile, but then—

" _Un_ believable," she musters finally, disbelief morphing into exasperation on her face. " _Three days_  she's been in New York, and already  _you're_  here." She points her palm at him as though wishing there was a gun in it. "What, did you put a tracker on her or something?"

Oh, that's _right_ , it's the mouth he's watched eight metric tonnes of  _bullshit_ spew out of.

"Casey — a pleasure, as always," he greets with a slight smirk and goes back to finishing up the buttons of his shirt. "Love the hair. What are you, uh, doing in Jade's lovely new apartment at — what is it — too early for visitors, in any case?"

Her eyes narrow into tiny slits. "My apartment. You mean mine."

"Ah!" He snaps his fingers in revelation. "I knew all these anger issues lying everywhere couldn't possibly be hers." At her eyeroll, he busts out a leisurely grin. "See? You missed me, after all. That's how Casey shows affection," he whispers conspiratorially to the other woman.

"Sorry, who are you, and why am I supposed to care?" that one replies, crossing her arms in a gesture almost identical to Casey's. Incredible, he thinks briefly. Even after all this time… Her penchant for creating loyal lap dogs should be bottled up. She'd make a fortune selling to military contractors.

"My apologies." He crosses the distance and holds out a hand. "I went to high school with Little Miss Sunshine over here. The name's Ike: entrepreneur, billionaire, Jade's lover — whatever label strikes your fancy."

"Pervert, drug addict, sociopath…" Casey continues under her breath as Tamara warily accepts the handshake and introduces herself.

"Okay, first — it was recreational," he clarifies in her direction, "and I think you've lost the moral high ground when even the fucking teachers keep trying to get you high." He swings a striped tie over his neck. "And secondly, Casey, I cannot  _believe_ that you would invoke a misunderstood label of the mentally ill just to make a point," he declares, shaking his head. "Way to contribute to the stigmatization of already marginalized communities — and you call  _me_ the insensitive one."

"Glad to see you finally cracked open a book," she says without flinching even a little bit. "Now get out before I throw you out."

No way; this is too much fun. "Now, hold on there, Casey — I happen to be a welcome guest," he points out, gearing up for battle. "If anyone has the right to boot me out, it's certainly not you."

Her scowl darkens. "Just because you found a way to manipulate your way into my friend's bedroom, that doesn't make you welcome here."

"Oh, just because I emerged from the room of a grown woman who has a perfectly good head on her shoulders and doesn't need to borrow yours—"

"Are you joking? You know damn well she's never been able to see straight when it comes to you," Casey insists. "She's too blinded by… whatever the fuck your appeal is."

"My dick, you mean."

She barely takes notice. "You're bad for her."

"And of course  _you're_ the only one who ever gets to make decisions about right and wrong—" he begins.

"Because you don't care about the distinction at all," she throws back. "Every time you storm in and sweep her up, I'm the one who has to pick up the pieces after you leave."

He groans. "What pieces? There are no pieces. We're all adults here; Jade knows what she's doing."

"Oh, please. If there's an ounce of decency in you, like you've somehow deluded her into thinking, then you'll stay away from her and never come back." She pointedly shoves at his chest. Behind her, Tamara watches them both with an open bottle of water stuck halfway to her mouth.

"'Deluded'? Wow, that's— " He just barely manages to stifle a snort.

"What?" Casey demands, gaze burning with either curiosity or something much more sinister. "That's  _what_ , exactly, Ike?"

He leans against the doorframe and studies her without bothering to hide his amusement. Her hair is shorter now and her eyes look somehow even bigger than they used to, but little else has changed. She still balls her fists the same way when she's angry, and it's still just as easy to wind her up as it is difficult to make her come down. She's one of the only people who's never succumbed to his charms even once, and one of the few who could go head to head with him in any debate.

"I'm curious, Casey," he says at last, "does Jade know how little you really think of her?"

There it is, that brief bewilderment. "That's not what I—" she begins.

" _Yes, it is,_ " Ike corrects, laughing. "That's exactly what you meant, and you know it."

"No, it's—"

"Oh, come on, Casey." He can't believe he even has to say it. "You're addicted to playing god! We all know this! You can't imagine that your self-imposed crusades might be somewhat misguided, or at the very least impertinent. This isn't  _news_." He gives her a light, symbolic shove back. "And, you know, I respect that — it's what made you a leader worth following back in the day. But things are a little different here in the real world."

She glares at his hand lingering on her shoulder. "Not  _that_ different."

"Well, I still have it on quite good authority that dictating other people's sex choices is generally frowned upon in civilized society," he declares and bends to tie his gray oxfords over a dusty chair with a hidden smirk. "I mean, at least wait until Jade's in the room. Ultimatums like that approach egocentrism of, dare I say,  _my_ proportions — which I am sure is the last comparison you want."

It takes her a few moments to respond, which in Ike's experience means she's either heavily pondering her next words or too furious to think about anything at all. "Don't twist it around like me trying to protect my friend from a bad relationship is some sort of authoritarian crime," Casey says at last, but there's an edge missing in her voice now as she settles in against the other side of the door jamb and taps his ankle with her sneaker.

He glances up at her as he shifts feet. "Okay, first — you calling this a 'relationship' is a bit of a stretch."  _Not a particularly big one_ , he adds mentally, with an odd tint of hopefulness, but… "I've been here one night; let's have some perspective. And secondly —  _are_ you actually trying to protect her, or is it the  _idea_ of being a good friend that you're so hellbent on preserving?"

"What are you talking about?" she scoffs with a shrug. "You're toxic; you've never pretended otherwise."

He finally straightens. "Well, Casey, look — am I a bad person?  _Sure_ ," he begins, putting on his vest. "I mean, your mileage may vary"— he winks at Tamara —"and in a sense, aren't we all terrible? But for argument's sake — whatever, I'm nuclear." He gives a dismissive wave. "That's not the issue at hand, though. The real question is: am I bad _for Jade_?" he points out. "And although she and I admittedly got off to a rough start, I think even you'll agree that the answer to that is ultimately a resounding 'no.'"

Casey once-overs him, blood spatter and all. "Ike, no offense, but if that's your conclusion, then you must've forgotten everything you've ever known about me."

"Okay," he says, finishing up the last button, "name  _one time_  I fucked her over."

She snorts. " _Well_ —"

" _After_ we started messing around," he clarifies pointedly. "I liked to play pranks when I initially got to the Academy," he explains to Tamara, who merely raises an eyebrow at Casey's ensuing scowl. "Let's just say my peers, uh, had a different sense of humor."

"Hmph, I bet," Tamara mutters, sizing him up. "I knew about ten of you at college. Pranks are all well and good as long as toilet paper's involved, but one of those guys liked to drown kittens." Her eyes narrow.

"Ah, well, I can promise you that I did no such thing," Ike says with his usual bravado, trying not to remember the people he  _had_ tried to drown. Then, to Casey: "And in any case, what are a mere few weeks of mild jackassery in the face of the two years we all spent as comrades in arms? I mean, if that doesn't grant me some slack, then — for all you know, I could've spent the last decade raising puppies and feeding the homeless," he says with some petulance. "You don't know my story."

Casey makes a face and stares off into the distance, fingertips drumming over her arm like they used to in every test he's ever seen her take. He can practically see the months of long ago whiz by in her mind and flash behind her slowly narrowing eyes. He watches, fascinated, as the rhythm of her fingers steadily increases from smooth, leisurely jazz to something out of a Led Zeppelin song.

Finally, she groans and says, "Ugh, fine. Point taken. About this  _one issue_ and nothing else." The glare remains. "You know what they say about leopard spots and first impressions."

"I do," he says brightly. "Would it make it easier for you if I dyed my hair purple and started referring to myself as Mike? Because I'm willing to do that. For the sake of our friendship."

"It would make it  _easier_ for me," she clarifies, "if you weren't here, or in Jade's life, at all."

He thinks that over for a good, long moment. "Well, I have some bad news for you, then, because—"

"Ike?" interrupts a slurred voice from behind him. "What's going on? I heard voices." A muffled groan. "Did you already manage to throw a party somehow?"

He whirs around to see a puffy-eyed Jade squeezing herself in a pink, short bathrobe from the door to her room. Her hair sticks out in tufts like the infamous Bowie wig in that awful goblin movie, but her white bunny slippers make the picture adorable rather than just sad. She shields her eyes from the bright lights of the kitchen as she comes closer — and halts midway through, just as he had, when she spots Casey.

"Oh," Jade mutters, turning a bit pink herself. "Roommates."

"Yes, you neglected to divulge that little bit of info last night," Ike says pointedly. "I could've been naked when I came out here."

Jade barely spares him a glance. "Casey — Tam — I thought you guys weren't getting here till noon."

"Clearly," Casey deadpans with a pointed look at Ike. "We took one look at that motel and decided to drive through the night instead. I was just about to go get some sleep when it turned out we had a  _visitor_."

"Yeah, sorry." Jade makes a face. "I wouldn't have brought him here if I knew you were coming. I sort of didn't mean to at all, but— whatever. Sorry. That can't have been a pleasant reunion."

Ike purses his lips. "Well, as a matter of fact, we were just debating whether you, as a former emo, have forfeited your right to bodily autonomy, so I'd say the conversation's pretty up to par with my personal expectations."

Jade frowns. "Wait, what?"

"He's joking," Casey says quickly. "I was just… expressing concern about falling into old patterns so quickly after a big life change."

"Concern?" He snickers, ignoring her glare. "You said, and I quote: 'stay away from her and never come back.' Tam can back me up on that," he adds quickly. "If that's concern, then Jade and I spent last night braiding each other's hair and watching football."

"Casey?" Jade looks to her, puzzled.

The blonde scowls at Ike some more, then sighs. "Look, it's just — we've been through this," she says. "How much of senior year did you guys spend fighting? I could never even tell if you two  _liked_ each other."

Ike glances at Jade, amused. "We didn't." He says it like he's lying, but of course they all know it's more complicated than that.

"Yeah, well, call me crazy, but I think you deserve more than that," Casey says to Jade. "I mean, what — best case scenario, you're wasting your time with a relationship that's never gonna go anywhere. And worst case?" she asks with a pointed glance at Tamara, who probably still thinks that Morning Glory Academy was the nation's top prep school until it 'accidentally' and 'tragically' burned down. "The word _'apocalypse'_ comes to mind," she says significantly.

"Uh huh." He raises a finger. "This isn't about that 'Antichrist' thing again, is it — 'cause I swear my mother had me exorcised like seven times."

Casey's entire posture sags with exasperation. "Oh my  _God_ , Ike, I'm trying to have a serious conversation about this."

"Are you?" he counters with a laugh. "Because the entire premise of this conversation is preposterous."

"See, the fact that you would even  _think_  that proves that you're not good enough for her," Casey says, crossing her arms. "Seriously, Jade, don't you think you deserve to be with someone who would care about your well-being?"

"Hey, I care—"

Casey silences him with a look. "I was talking to  _her_."

And then she waits.

In the middle, Jade looks back and forth between the both of them, eyes still puffy, brow still pinched. Her fingers rub her upper arms, and her bare legs are adorned with goosebumps. Flakes of leftover mascara sprinkle under her heavy eyes. He waits and waits in obedient silence as her expression sours incrementally with every passing look she gives them, and then, finally…

"This is  _way_  too early in the morning to be having conversations about my 'worth,'" she decides with a husky grunt. "Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you two — we don't even have a coffee pot yet."

"So asking for a cup to-go would be out of the question, then?" Ike asks with genuine disappointment.

"Oh, sure, I'd love to make some," Casey says with a smile. "How do you take yours — cream, sugar? Poison?"

He scoffs. "Can you believe how she's treating me?" he says to Jade. "All morning, exactly like this."

"Ike, you're not really helping your case," Jade mutters under her breath. Then: "Blevins, I hear you, and I love you — but you don't get to make the call on this one."

Casey spends another long moment scowling at Ike as though the words had come out of his mouth instead of Jade's, but then she unwillingly takes her eyes off him and turns them to her best friend. "Are you  _sure_?" she asks, now with kindness in place of skepticism. "Because after everything we've done to forget that place… This move was supposed to be about new beginnings," she reminds.

"It still is—" Jade protests.

She holds up a hand. "You know how powerful the effects of old environments can be — remember how you were when we went back to Iowa? And look, it's different when people change alongside each other, like _we_ did, but, clearly, that didn't happen here," Casey mutters with another brief glare at him. Suddenly, he wonders what his life might've turned out like if he'd gone to college in Chicago with the rest of them. "I mean, just look at how  _I'm_ acting," she says with a grimace. "Five minutes with him, and it's like I'm sixteen all over again."

"You mean you  _don't_ routinely threaten the lives of random men over such humongous infractions as wanting  _coffee_ anymore?" he mutters.

Casey ignores that. "Look, if what you really want is to get your life messed up — which is the only thing that's gonna happen hanging out with Ike—" she warns. "If you just want the 'danger' and the sex, that's fine, but you could find someone new to do that, you know," she says. "Someone who won't make you regress a decade every time you're in a room together."

Jade scratches her neck with a peculiar expression. "Come on, Case, you can't possibly think that little of me."

And for the first time that morning, Casey utters what could be mistaken for a chuckle — at the same time that Ike claps his hands together with a loud, _"Hah!"_

"Oh, lord," Casey mutters as he starts taking an elaborate, self-congratulating bow at each of the women, his grin a mile wide.

"What?" Jade asks once more, leaning away with a grimace when he turns to her.

Casey exchanges a look with Tam, and her face sours. "That's almost verbatim what he said," she explains unwillingly, then releases a deep breath and shakes her head. And then… " _Fine_ ," she gives in. "Fine! Do what you want; I'm not your boss." Her hands rise. "Race into the inferno if you wanna burn so fucking much — I'm not gonna say another word. Just know that when this all crashes, I'm getting a big, fat 'I told you so' painted on the wall or something."

Ike nods agreeably. "'Take your broken parts and make them into art,'" he quotes, or maybe paraphrases. "I was just saying to Jade how the walls looked a little bare."

Jade snorts. "Right, just need to make sure we 'display it as such,'" she mutters, but she's smiling at him. Then she gives a sharp exhale and wipes her face. "Okay, so now that this incredibly important and pressing dilemma has been settled, can everybody just go away so I can crawl back into bed?"

" _Yes_ , right, I should get to work," Ike says, fixing up his tie one last time with a yawn. "Or home — or wherever I was gonna go before these two ambushed me."

"In our own kitchen?" Casey counters dryly, at the same time as Tamara says, "Nice to meet you — I think?"

Jade sighs a particular sort of sigh, one he expects her to overdose on in the coming future. "Sorry about all this, Tam."

Tam bursts out laughing. "Are you kidding me? This is like watching soaps in real life," she says, getting another bag of chips from her backpack. "'You fuck off!' 'No,  _you_ fuck off!'" she mimics. "Very entertaining."

"You know," Ike says pensively, "I think you and I would get along splendidly if my arch nemesis weren't about to start poisoning you against me the minute I walk out through that door."

"Oh, honey, she started that the moment you walked in," Tam corrects in between chips. "Lucky for you, I've known her my entire life, and I know damn well what an unreliable narrator she can be." She smirks with some private joke.

Casey scoffs. "Et tu, Tam?"

"Hey, I'm not marrying the guy," Tam protests easily, "I'm just saying you're not a saint either."

"Great, now all my friends are abandoning me," Casey says, staring them all down one by one, and then sighs. "Oh, well, if we're doing this, then  _fine_ — I can't believe I'm about to say this, but…" Casey starts, grimacing wildly. "It's… good to see you, Ike."

He takes it in — the sweet, sweet scent of victory. What a start to the day, he thinks, and it's not even six a.m. "See, I knew you missed me," he repeats, moving in for a hug, but she leans away.

"Don't push it," Casey warns.

Jade stares the two of them down once more, then shakes her head, grabs Ike by the elbow, and drags him to the door.

He stumbles a few times on the trash that is literally everywhere, but it's a nice excuse to reach for her shoulder, her waist… you know, for support. She opens the door without a word and waits for him to exit, an unusual bent in the lines of her mouth. He almost starts to wonder if she's mad at him about something, but she walks through it with him and carefully leaves it half-open behind her, lingering in the hallway. In the background, he thinks he can hear one of the other women conspicuously shuffling closer to them. He can't quite decide whose prying ears would be worse — Casey's blatant disapproval or Tamara's voyeuristic curiosity — but he can understand her hesitance to be heard.

There are many things to be said at this juncture, many things to acknowledge and decide and potentially apologize for, but before he can settle on any one thought, she speaks instead.

"I'm sorry about that," she says. "I should have told you about Casey. I just— I didn't it want it to become… well, exactly what happened in there." She rubs her forehead with a grimace.

"Oh, but  _what_ would sleeping with you be without Casey yelling at me?" He grins. "Don't worry, I've always considered it a package deal."

Though she tries, she can't keep her lips from quirking up. "Still, I didn't mean to put you on the spot like that," she repeats. "All that talk about what I 'deserve'…" A shudder runs through her her whole body, from her shoulders all the way down to the floppy ears of her bunny slippers. "Not exactly the 'morning after' conversation I was planning on."

"No, I agree with her," Ike says, surprising himself, because she looks genuinely uncomfortable at the thought of being held in high regard, and he's seen her look that way more times than he can count, but he's never been quite as bothered by it before.

And once those words are out, he can't stop the rest.

"Jade, you don't exactly have the best track record with avoiding darkness, person-shaped or otherwise," he says, mostly thinking of himself. "I know old habits can be difficult to break, but you shouldn't undervalue yourself. You have so much heart and spirit and… spunk," he realizes. "You are resourceful and engaging, and you're  _kind_ in a way that very few people are. You've made a good life for yourself, even after they took everything — and you have even somehow managed not to lose the optimism and faith that I so used to resent." He stuffs his hands into his pockets and stares at a faint stain on the floor. "I know we all have baggage, even the Academy notwithstanding," he says slowly, carefully, "but you deserve someone who recognizes and values all that."

It is potentially the longest string of words he's ever said without insulting anything, but he doesn't look up, even as the silence left in their wake becomes almost painful, lest his mouth get any more ideas. Who knows what else might be hiding in there, just begging to come out. He almost wants to go back and ensure that she knows exactly how little he thinks of the people who are less delightful than her — that is to say, everyone — but that seems like dangerous territory, even for him. If he's not careful, he might tell her he's always thought the world of her, even when his estimation of the world itself hadn't been quite that high.

"So do you," she says then, and she sounds like she means it.

He nods slowly. "Thanks."

And it's quiet again.

Honesty lingers in the air like the scent of rainfall after a drought. Maybe last night hadn't been the brightest idea after all. Maybe every step they'd taken towards each other is one more step they'll have to undo once they realize how foolish they were being. They could part ways here, just two people who know their limits, and that could be the end of that.

But he smiles to himself instead and peeks up at her, a sudden recklessness in his chest. "So… got any plans tonight?"

In years past, there would have been only one interpretation for his words. It's the ultimate dick move, to acknowledge what someone's worth and then tell them,  _I don't care — have me instead_. He used to do it quite a bit as a teen, always laughing at how easy it was to get insecure people to do anything with a single compliment — often wondering how easy  _he'd_ be to manipulate if anyone ever bothered to say anything nice about him.

And he  _hadn't_ cared that they deserved better, or that he was reinforcing a destructive pattern that would likely follow them far beyond the affair itself; he'd just fooled himself into thinking that announcing his faults upfront had absolved him of any responsibility for his actions thereafter. The more wounded among his subjects hadn't actually seen through his flimsy facade at all, desperate for hope as they were — they'd mistaken him for a savior, and he'd never bothered to correct them.

Today, though, when he says  _You deserve something good_ , for the first time what he really means is,  _Maybe I can be that for you_.

He waits as she thinks the words over, the anticipation waking him up just as well as the caffeine would have — and then slowly her face blooms into a smile. Of course she'd heard exactly what he wasn't saying. They always could.

"Just a hot date with all those boxes," she says, exactly as he'd predicted before. "That'll probably take up most nights for a while, but I think I can manage to sneak away for a few hours… if the offer's good enough."

He nods, something inside him flying. "Then I'll pick you up around seven."

She raises an eyebrow. "My, my, how confident we are," she says in a voice that sends tingles down his sides. "Where are you taking me?"

Oh, not  _even_  if he could remember the name of the freaking band.

"Surprise," he says and takes a step to kiss her goodbye. He means to be gentle and light, but he can't stop his arms from winding around her waist and drawing her closer any more than she can stop hers from twisting in his hair. There's something inevitable about it all, and there always has been — perhaps that's why he'd so often reacted to her odd pull with irritation and impatience. Always eager to be somewhere else — to get away from her when the helplessness got to be too much; to find her once more the moment she was out of sight; and so on, ad infinitum.

But he's not impatient now. Even as his hands ascertain that they still remember what her body feels like, it's something serene now instead of wild.

In fact, he becomes so captivated by the moment, so out of touch with the concept of time itself, that it's only when the watch on his wrist goes off again that he remembers he has somewhere to be — somewhere he is rapidly becoming late for. Even so, he stays close when he finally pulls away, hesitant to take his eyes off her for fear that she'll disappear. This could still all be a dream, after all; he could wake up the moment she's out of sight, and then he'll be back in his non-functional apartment, with his barely functioning life — and all without consciously realizing how much he'd been missing her until she was already in his arms.

He wants to remember everything about the way she looks just then — the tired eyes, the easy smile, the patch of freckles on her nose that is nearly indistinguishable from a tan after this long summer. The sparkle in her eyes that he thinks of as synonymous with her uncanny ability to give as good as she gets, in conversation as well as in bed.

For a decade or so, he'd used to pride himself on dismantling the very concept of fate. He'd been present in too many board meetings to believe that man-centric 'coincidences' were anything less than a conspiracy, and as for everything else, well… Sentient or not, the universe just didn't give a shit about whether you'd take rainfall on the third Wednesday of the month as a sign that you were in danger of drowning. All that time, he'd relentlessly mocked anyone stupid enough to believe that anything significant ever happened without somebody pulling the strings.

And he'd been right about most of it, of course — but even if he hadn't already abandoned the practice years ago, he couldn't imagine ever looking at it quite the same way now. Not after running into her in a city of millions, just days after she'd arrived. Her, the only person in the world whom he would believe when she says that she didn't know he would be there. Her, the one he's once or twice in a drunken haze referred to as potentially, unsuccessfully his 'soulmate'— even while maintaining that he doesn't believe in those, even feeling somehow like the two convictions do not contradict each other at all.

He'd noticed her hair first, all flames and gold flickering in the wind. He'd stood there, stunned, for an eternal second, unable to make sense of the image before him. Even as he'd said her name, his mind had refused to believe it could really be her.

New York was home, was real, but what was the Academy if not merely a nightmare out of some supernatural storybook? Certainly, he could still go to sleep and visit the dream — like the times he'd been in Chicago, or the work he'd done for his father, or when he'd hired Irina two years ago for some 'diplomatic' missions — but he had never thought the dream could touch him here, in the place which harbors his scarce roots, the place where a considerable part of his day now consists of making conference calls and reading financial reports.

The blood and the magic of the Academy had about as little to do with his relatively mundane existence of parties and meetings as his Porsche does with a damn rocket-propelled grenade. Or so he'd thought.

But then she'd turned around, and his worlds had collided. And for a brief moment — the first ever moment — he had felt whole.

"I'm glad I had an inexplicable hankering for bagels last night," he says now with another kiss.

"Yeah, that'll teach you to badmouth New York's favorite breakfast food," she says, and he shakes his head at all the rants he used to go on about all the ways the habits of his father's colleagues were terrible merely because he hated the bastards themselves. He'll never complain about another unsightly food truck on a perfectly nice street corner again. "I would've looked you up eventually, you know," she says slowly, softly. "Maybe not for a few months, or a few years, but at some point. Curiosity always wins."

He nods, a strange delight swelling in his chest. "We've never been very good at saying goodbye, have we?" he muses, very aware of her waist under his fingers, very aware of all the ways he's tried to stall this moment over the last twelve hours. "Well, I suppose there's nothing to do but stop trying." He unwinds his arms from her and takes a step back, inhaling deeply. "I'll see you tonight. Wear something comfortable."

* * *

 

As she watches him walk down the hall, his parting laugh still ringing in her ears, she once again finds herself wishing she could have recorded that, too. His hum, the click of his tongue when he's annoyed, the way he cocks his hip when he's standing still… So many little things forgotten, so many things waiting to be rediscovered.

He glances back one last time before he rounds the corner, all grins and cockiness and infectious excitement, and her heart gives another thud. She waves back just as he disappears — and as the peculiar magic that's enveloped her in his presence all night slowly wanes and she goes back into her apartment, her regular life, it slowly dawns on her. She hadn't really expected that they would see each other again after finally parting ways this night — not for a long while, at least. From the start, she's been cataloguing all the ways he's changed and all the ways he hasn't, because deep down she'd been convinced she wouldn't get another chance.

On some level, she's been thinking of this night as a memory even while she was still living it.

But as she surveys the mountains of boxes in her room and idly wonders which of them might be hiding 'something comfortable', the reality starts sinking in. It doesn't matter if she's noticed or noted or recorded her favorite things about him or not, because they're not a one-off deal. Anything worth remembering will pop up again and again, and now she'll have the chance to witness it. She'll make him laugh, and she'll watch him embarrass himself, and she won't have any need to reach for the memories, because life will be happening in the present instead. There will be time.

And, sure, maybe this will all burn. Maybe they're terrible for each other and there won't be any nights beyond this one. Maybe Casey will be right, and it'll end like it always has, and they'll go their separate ways until the next time they're naive enough to believe otherwise.

But maybe it won't.

Finally, there is uncertainty. Finally, they're getting in the elevator and going sightseeing up top. Finally, it feels like they're ready to  _try_.

And who even knows what they're trying  _for_ — she doesn't have a clue what she wants out of this, not when it's seemed so impossible for so long, whereas he seems to go through life without any particular expectations or ambitions whatsoever — but somehow there's a sense that, finally, they have a chance of being finished. One way or another, pain or glory, that feels like a happy ending right there.

Smiling to herself, she climbs back into bed and snuggles into her sheets. It's not dark anymore; there's a golden light now flowing into the room in between the lush leaves of the trees outside, the start of a new day. It plays twinkly games on the wall whenever a breeze rustles…

Jade marvels at the beauty of it all as waves of gratitude wash over her, one of the last remnants of a devoutness that she used to cherish in herself. It's a thankfulness for so much: for this moment, for last night, for the future stretching out before her — but also for her still being alive, for having made it out of hell when it had seemed so unlikely.

For having the opportunity every single day to choose between dwelling inside the terrible memories or living beyond them; for having the strength, most days, at least, to make the right choice — to see what else is out there for her, what else the world has in store for everyone who survived.

Maybe it's not a happy ending, after all. Maybe stories have no business claiming to be finished just when things get good, just when the real living is about to begin. She'd forgotten it always used to bug her when she read romance novels as a teen. Her own parents' marriage had been, against all odds, a fairly happy one before the accident — and she could never help but lament how incomplete any story of them would be, were it to end the moment they'd decided to stick it out with each other, all those decades ago. For all her trepidation about better futures — any futures, really — maybe the best part is still waiting up ahead. Maybe it's always still waiting up ahead.

No, her story is far from over — and she has an inkling that neither is theirs.

 

**Author's Note:**

> (Alternatively titled: Jade and Ike have a conversation.) (Or perhaps: Jade and Ike peel an onion.)
> 
> I can't believe I'm finally posting this. It began as an errant thought in July 2015 while riding around a forest at 5 a.m.. It took up most of the first half of 2018 and required about nine months of full-time writing in total, plus numerous revisits to tweak things once it was 99.995% done but not quite at 100%, because this was the most intense and frustrating and rewarding writing process I've ever been through. It's the most self-indulgent thing I've ever written, something I wrote mostly just so that I could read it. (Happiness in Morning Glories? Blasphemy!) (Don't worry, the next wip I'm tackling — from all the way back in 2014! — is a grimdark jadeike with ample amounts of brainwash, blood, and trauma, so it all evens out.)
> 
> Some notable things about the process:
> 
> 1\. [This Spotify playlist of 40 songs](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0RqBkporAE0smdNxRPDL3m) that is part general jadeike, part the specific moods I was going for, and part "no relation to this fic except helping me write it" — I'll leave it to you to decide which is which. ([Also.](https://youtu.be/YINgOpBnYBE?t=27s)) ([Also.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M87XT8uAsfo))
> 
> 2\. Realizing once it was 90% finished that on many levels this fic is basically just Veronica Mars The Movie. (By which I mostly mean that [one iconic](https://66.media.tumblr.com/218d428fba96df153b776a2458c68d0d/tumblr_mrax8vLm6u1sf3xw5o1_500.gif) [bridge scene ](https://78.media.tumblr.com/ea5427d3d4da96eded65388720154156/tumblr_inline_n2ll8j0cUS1ror6v2.gif)with "Chicago" by Sufjan Stevens playing.)
> 
> 3\. In general, continually finding things that would have 100% inspired certain elements of this fic had those elements not already been written by the time I encountered this media. (In some cases, this was a matter of literal days or even hours.) Among them: the [Emma Stone ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDjz2jU2oAg)and [Ryan Gosling](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwwQWKPoeM8) bits of [Crazy, Stupid, Love](https://youtu.be/vFvWh_XSnK4?t=62). ["Trouble" by The Technicolors](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhgZqaf6WWU), which is basically this fic encapsulated in music form. Most of the movie  _Before We Go_. ["Better Man" by Little Big Town](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRYGo39q6lg). The Isabel/Cole dynamic in The Wolves of Mercy Falls series. And probably a few other things as well. 
> 
> ( **EDIT NOV 19:** Also ["Fixed" by Sam Tsui](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b119AAFDQnY), which is just incredible. And that predominant line "well, if we're broken, I don't wanna be fixed," with that euphoric chorus backing up the bad, risky, but potentially incredibly rewarding decisions... That's, like, maybe an even more apt summary of this fic than "Trouble", "Treacherous", or "Better Man".)
> 
> 4\. If ever Ike's eyes are described as being clear, sharp, or jewel-like, that is 100% the result of [this image](http://oi66.tinypic.com/2hhge55.jpg).
> 
> Anyway, thank you so much for reading, if you managed to get this far! This is probably my favorite thing I've ever written at this point in my life, and I hope it felt cohesive to you, because, Lemme Tell You, it was written so extremely out of order that the story itself changed several times once key parts were already finished. Most of the blood and time I poured into this was just trying to make it feel like it was one story instead of twelve. (That 3,770-word bit between "Why haven't you kissed me, Ike" and the actual kiss? Yeah, that was originally supposed to be about two sentences.) So, since I'm expecting about five people total to read this, leave a comment if you liked it — it would make my day — and I'll see you with the next fic in, I dunno, a year or something.


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